Scarecrow - 7:50 pm on Oct 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Google can take off to the bahamas, they can rebuild their server farm, they can reprogram everything, they did it before with relatively no resources, now it's just a tiny drop in their cash reserves; they can do it all at once, and if they can't, there will be some unemployed googlers very soon.

Your argument is convincing. Okay, let's assume that they're holding off for something big to happen, whether it is 64-bit hardware, or whatever.

Then the question becomes, "Why have the band-aids they've applied to their index in the last 18 months been so pathetic? This alone should have been enough to endanger the IPO!"

If Yahoo can do it without PageRank, why can't Google? (True, they both are overly-dependent on keywords in anchor text.)

If one person at Gigablast can do almost all of the programming for a very respectable engine, why does Google have to rely on cute colored logos to keep everyone impressed?

At the very least, I think there's a management problem at Google and their priorities are messed up. But it's an uphill argument when they're all getting stinkin' rich over there in Mountain View. Maybe after Bubble2.0 we'll be able to figure out what happened.