atlrus - 2:21 pm on May 9, 2007 (gmt 0)

It's commonly assumed that Google's initial success was a result of grassroots promotion from within the technical community.

And it's a wrong assumption - Google success was a result of their good service (back then), i.e. of the customers - you can grassroot Ask all you want, and still no one would ever use it.

I don't think he was bashing webmasters that follow Google rules. He's bashing the folks that believe following Googles rules is somehow 'right', 'the only thing to do', or 'ethical'.

And it is. In my example earlier Google brings me 95% of SE traffic, thus I go by their rules (This applies only to websites depending on SE traffic to survive). If I don't like the rules - I am free to NOT follow them. But to call me brain-washed because I choose the free traffic over cloaking - that's offensive.

If someone scrapes and republishes my content without my explicit permission, isn't that wrong? Of course it is. It's important to make the distinction that Google doesn't have the actual right to do this, we simply allow it because it's a profitable relationship.

Google does not scrape your content. One sentence is not considered content, and that's all Google shows on their results. And if you count the direct link to your website - it's pretty much like their version of an "organic" link. You cannot compare it with scraping, because scraping websites is 100% useless to the end user and it's done mostly to inflate content and rank better on the SEs - Google does not need to rank on Google ;)

The rest has been around long before Google - robots.txt, search engines, etc. was not introduced by Google, so I don't see why would you blame it for following the long time established search engine purpose - to crawl any website possible. Since long before Google was established the rule has been - if you don't want your page in a search engine - exclude it from the robot.txt - what's new?