Mark_A - 9:35 am on Jun 3, 2010 (gmt 0)

If you had a retail outlet in a good location, with lots of walk by shoppers (walking on the free pavement/sidewalk), you would expect a pretty major notification if the local government decided they were going to stop pedestrian access to that particular road, Google are providing the road, they should inform users of any impending closures.

Thing is, google has never shown as much responsibility to webmasters as a council does to shop keepers. Google has as long as I can remember had its monthly algo changes and hang the consequences. Of course that is not to say that there are no consequences, plainly there are. Notice how there are never any algo changes (or the like) for adwords advertisers, money talks.

The problem is that there is only google. What we need is a healthy 2 or 3 or 4 search engines each with a reasonable share so we could balance between them and when we lose with one, gain with another.