diberry - 10:21 pm on Oct 8, 2012 (gmt 0)

This might finally answer our questions about why the SERPs are getting worse instead of better: they're not top priority anymore.

I don't think traditional search is dead, but maybe Google is just sick of it - from their perspective, it's all fighting SEO and being asked by confused elected officials why they can't just keep pirates out of the SERPs. Maybe they're ready to let all that be someone else's headache - and in that sense, it could work for webmasters by shifting the Google search dominance to other engines.

OTOH, the content stealing that we've already seen with Google, ehow, etc., is alarming. Maybe it finally really is time for a mass blocking of the bot.