wattsnew - 7:28 pm on Mar 23, 2005 (gmt 0)

The scrapers take your sites' positions in the SERPs. Your sites presumably have content and are of some use to the searcher. So this diversion is no service to the searcher, who long term will determine Google's net worth.

Remember how all the now forgotten search engines used to try anything to get ad clicks - until the FTC threatened them with regulations requiring better identification of advertisements? This is just Google's disguise for the same thing. A results page full of scrapers means that the searcher is forced to hit an adwords ad either way - on the "natural" search results or on the ads column.

Will a "clean" search engine without bait and switch "natural" SERPs come along and trash Google? I doubt it. A search engine has to have revenue.

I haven't stopped using Google as a search engine. The SERPs are not usually too bad so far, and you get used to recognizing a scraper without clicking on it. But evenually this will bite Google, so hopefully they have a plan... Meantime, gosh it's surely hard to keep all the shareholder-staff at the GooglePlex concentrating on something other than NASDAQ.