penfold25 - 4:45 am on Jun 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Fair Play?, what rubbish, google can do what they like, i use them and continue to use them because their are fantastic at what they do, by providing great results instantly. They owe you nothing and neither do to any webmaster, if anything they do it as a courtesy. When google first started, it never became popular because webmasters decided it was so. Im not sure what propaganda machine is happening here but google still provides great results for me, the only thing ive seen kill their results have been the increasing competition between affiliates (eg finding a hotels office homepage is very hard). If anything this is webmaster's fault, not google's. However to maintain their index to be fresh and full of quality results they do work with webmasters to encourage them to stick to quality, however with many new webmasters getting on a bandwagon it is getting alot harder. This massive explosion of competition on the web occured with adsense and with all these people jumping in for the "easy money". Then again that is still not google's fault. I think it is a very bad business model to rely on google, they bring most of the web traffic, however ever thought about advertising offline so they think of you before they think of google when buying a certain product?