zett - 5:56 pm on Aug 18, 2009 (gmt 0)

If a single company (or rather: their staff) can de facto decide what is being found on the web and what not, that's a very dangerous situation. That is to be avoided at all cost. Having a number of equally strong competitors is a much better situation for the consumer. And for us as webmasters, too, because we still can get traffic and earn a living should Google decide to give us a -50, -500, -950, -5000 penalty. If they had less power, webmasters might just shrug and move on. It's just such a big issue today, because they have so much (i.e. too much) power.

If a single company can easily pull together an alomst seamless user profile of any web user, that's also a very dangerous situation. Think of the AOL data disaster a few years ago. And that was "just" a fairly large sample, and anonymized too. But it was (and still is!) scary to see what could be revealed from that data. Again, Google has way too much power here.

I love Bing, because it's fresh, and the results are OK. Funny name too. I promote Bing on our sites, and also with friends and family. More power for Bing, please.