lammert - 11:10 pm on Jan 25, 2005 (gmt 0)

Pmkpmk: a partner program for Google is not in their benefit. They are there primarily for the searching crowd, not for the webmasters. If they had partners I would be very suspicious of the SERPS, never know if the first entries were really the best ones or just partner listings.

They have enough information as Brett already explained to decide what is best for the user. Having a few "reliable" partners gives only problems when it comes to contract administration, screening etc. They might save a few % bandwidth, but I don't think they are interested in that.

Hiring a FireFox developer on the other hand gives them exactly what they need: knowledge how flat data in HTML, PHP, SWF, MPG or whatever format is translated to the user experience. And by making that translation in their bot they will be miles in front of Yahoo and MSN (again).

They need such a major improvement. Just a few years ago almost all search engines used results from the Google technology. Yahoo now uses Inktomi and the beta version of MSN is life. Google knows what happened to Altavista in just a short period, I am sure they don't want to go the same road.