1script - 3:50 pm on Sep 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

My gripe here is that google is focused more on punishing a website trying to manipulate its SERP's than providing accurate search results to the end user.

Brinked, this is so true! Google's got into the "the whole world is against us" mode and with each successive algo/animal update it gets itself deeper in it still. They probably have this rosy idea that if only they could clean all the spam from their index, their results will be perfect. But from what I can see they are nowhere near being clean and the results are getting worse and worse because they spend all their resources (computing and human) on combating spam, or perceived spam and nothing much is being done towards improving relevancy. I mean, I do still use Google myself and you can call their results useful, far-reaching, diverse [insert a few more good words here] but they are definitely no more relevant to the query than they were in 2000. Not much of a progress toward organizing the world's information.

They started clinging to a select few very high profile sites that, although not the best informational choice for any query, at least are guaranteed to be not spam (as Google sees it) - and that seems enough rank them all over the first SERPs. (eHow, Amazon)

I guess becoming a monopoly has its own side-effects, ha? Maybe the entire world really is against them? Nobody likes a monopoly, so it would be easily explained...