motorhaven - 11:20 am on Jul 17, 2012 (gmt 0)

nonmis5,

There's nothing wrong with being profit driven - its what's built the great technical innovations of the past two centuries. When you serve your customers the way they want to be served you make a profit. Google has shown that in the past when they took the lion's share of the search market. They also illustrated what happens when you don't give them what they want, as they lost 20% of their market share in the past year or so.

Its not Bing or Google's responsibility to make our businesses profitable. It's our choice to build business models which rely on SERPs to grow - we praise them when the SERP results benefit us and turn against them when they don't but tend to forget for every company moving up in the SERPs there's one moving down. Its the name of the game, there can only be a single page 1 result for a search term.

I've been on both the losing and win end of SERP result changes, and while I don't like it when I'm on the losing end I also understand its the game I made the choice to play. The first rule of winning a game is to know I'm playing it.

Facebook, Ebay and Amazon are examples of models which have relied on branding and a wanted service which weren't built on SERP results.