If your site became successful, wouldn't you as well?
So, I woiuldn't sweat it.
That said, while I doubt their is a conspiracy on the part of the search engines, a .us may well be a liability, due to consumer confusion leading to lack of confidence.
If you have an "information" site, I think this will be less so. But I think people tend to distrust odd TLDs. .us somewhat so,
.biz somewhat to much less - if only because it is a misspelling that makes them think some snot-nose punk kid is running the site :) .to, confidence drops off the scale.
Have you considered a .org? I think that for an information site, .org may actually instill MORE confidence.
My opinion only, not based on a formal study. But I'll bet there's been one or more, and you might want to seek them out.
against 3 billion + pages of .com ... you're not seeing as many .us simply because there are less pages
.US is not treated like over seas ccTLDS .. Google dosent have a seperate index for .us like they do for .de for example
You are perfectly fine developing .US ...it really makes no difference
.US will be huge over the decade.. Domainers are investing heavily in .US..
