decaff - 6:06 pm on Aug 1, 2006 (gmt 0)

Webmasters and SEOs who get mad at Google like to bring up the example of AltaVista as a search engine that "lost the support of the Webmaster community" and was replaced by Google...

Completely different world back in 1999/2000 when this transition took place..AV was on a much smaller scale as a search engine then is Google and the WWW was a much smaller place, overall...

AV was, at that time, a dying entity...filled with horrific spam (webmasters/seo'ers) and not able to deal at all with the onslaught...
As they tried to counter their engine suffered huge losses...plus Google being the new kid in the game was ripe for the picking and many webmasters/seo'ers went after Google with a vengance...

Google has done a better job of countering the onslaught...and they are easily number 1 for most searches...(and if you really know how to search with advanced operators...you can find exactly what you want)...
...as for the general public vs. the webmasters...the general public (everyday users) will, of course, retain the bulk of G's attention over the small webmaster community...
But we, at least, have to have our say in the matter....