Robert_Charlton - 2:01 am on May 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

The Shower Scene - Excellent first post... extremely thought provoking. Welcome to WebmasterWorld.

The situation is paradoxical in that both Google and the webmasters want it both ways.

Google would rather not have its algos affect what it's measuring on the web, but inevitably, in a competitive situation, the carrot of high rankings will influence what's out there.

Webmasters would rather not have Google force its model of the web upon them, and Google's model of the web is the web without the temptation of profit from Google rankings. It's an idealized vision, paradoxically funded by advertising.

We're expecting Google and Google reps to behave the way they did before Google became a wildly successful, major public corporation... and Google is apparently expecting us to behave the way it perhaps theorized we did before it became a wildly successful, major, public corporation.

The degree of Google's success is both admirable and frightening. The public dialogue isn't frank in either direction because of the amounts of money involved, and, as Shower Scene points out, because of the intellectual laziness of the discussion.

Many of us had hoped for at least a three-horse race. We've got instead a couple of stragglers led by one giant horse that some of us fear might be named Bro. It gallops along, I believe with the best of intentions, but is ultimately spurred ahead by the same mixture of human ambitions that drive us all. And maybe that's what's most frightening... or perhaps most encouraging... to those who share those instincts.