mattg3 - 4:05 am on May 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

Buying links hits at the very core of Google SE that worked in a mostly still academic web in the beginning (Kinda trivial but important for Google College Plex). Academic aka non commercial ethics are hence the very core the G SE works on. Sadly in a world of commerce that link voting is useless. Buying links with users in mind on the right pages has to be a prime strategy to get alternative traffic, besides doorway pages that exclude the G bot. By buying links also instead of adwords you actually might do the actual socialist thingy and distribute the wealth a bit away from the richer part of the USA ..

So G need to enforce these ethics or their search engines 1999 concept is out of the window ..

But the backlink system which is actually how academia rates importance of papers is also often manipulated.

Outside the ivory tower things get tougher.. as commerce is inheritely unethical imo.

Imagine the complexities of real life in a search engine. Gazzillions of laws and judgements would have to be built in. The SE's need fairytale worlds to get their rankings sorted. AI and real world are far off.