Wizard - 7:18 pm on Apr 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

who's G (or any other SE for that matter) to tell us what we are allowed to do with our web pages

I see the point of this questions, but the other hand, who are we to tell what G should penalize and what should not? If they decided to ban all commercial sites from regular index, and show only non-commercial results + adwords - this is their right to decide.

Google interest is to provide good results, as without this they are out of business. But they can make any guidelines they wish, if they think that penalizing and banning other sites will improve the results.

And the results from G aren't as bad as some people say. They are horrible in commercial topics, and great in other. When I search for a popular open source operating system official website, or online documentation of popular open source database, I use "I'm feeling lucky" button because I already know this searches give perfect match for #1.

If I were looking for cheap flights to city #*$! or hotels reservations in city xxx, I'd probably have no chance to find anything worth clicking. Or maybe I could find more interesting stuff among adwords.

But Google is more for searching for information, than for products and services, isn't it. Because if we assume otherwise, there will always be the fight and chaos in SERPs, unless the algo eliminates all potential spam and a few good sites by the way.

I believe the spam eliminating algos may be improved, but right now, Google doesn't seem to use algorithms to ban sites with white on white or CSS hidden keywords and links, so I don't understand the reason of penalizing OO. Unless they use black box algo, and it's the result.