hundredly - 1:50 am on Aug 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

Well - from my perspective as a paranoid webmaster, the most interesting thing about this story is that Google seems to be using the same social engineering technique on reporters that it does on webmasters.

If a Google detects that a webmaster is doing some link farming, or building up spam sites, it's going to drop his sites from the index for an undetermined period of time.

Right now, getting dropped is the biggest topic among webmasters in the Google News forum - and this fear (of being dropped), prbbly inspires more than a few webmasters to walk a straight line with their SEO methods.

Google seems to think that it can train (inspire fear?) in reporters using the same tactic.

... of course - I think that Google holds much greater power over webmasters, than they could ever hope to over media companies and reporters.

:D ... again, just the humble opinion of a highly paranoid webmaster.