Planet13 - 5:47 pm on Jan 26, 2012 (gmt 0)

One more thing:

All the other sites but one on the front page of Google for my niche are either IBM sized brands, or independents that are doing blackhat/spammy link building.

And Adwords, I am sure.

Yes, I know that adwords listings are not organics - but their expanded prominence on the front page, along with crappier and crappier results in the organics, seems to be little coincidence.

It really seems to me that google is simply turning into a search function for sites like amazon, target, wal-mart, etc, as opposed to a search engine. Maybe that's what the people want?

On the other hand, it seems to me like the future for bing gets rosier with every google update.