europeforvisitors - 3:02 pm on Aug 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

I doubt if most users pay much attention to toolbar PR, so whether the green bar is there or not, or whether it's accurate or blatantly wrong isn't likely to be a big deal from a typical user's perspective.

However, I'd be happy to see the PR gauge disappear, mainly because:

1) Dumping the green bar might help to reduce the flood of spam "link exchange" e-mails that promise a link from a PRn page, and...

2) It might discourage obsessions with PageRank by site owners who think PR is the only factor that Google uses in its search algorithm.

I don't expect the green bar to go away any time soon, though, because it encourages toolbar use (especially by the kind of people Google wants to watch).