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I personally love a clean html-only site, so fit perfectly in Google's mould.. however I often create sites for clients who want something 'flashier'.. it takes a lot of convincing to talk them around to pulling it back to basic and maybe using only a few flash elements rather than the whole navigation system. I have seen some absolutely fantastic flash websites out there (using simple interfaces), which I seriously regret not seeing in Google results.. in fact, when I show people such sites they are surprised that it was even possible on the internet!
Another area is framesets: this surely is a tool for webmasters to cut down on bandwidth, loading times and increase speed and usability for the end user.. and yet it is futile creating something with framesets if no-one can find it on the internet!
I do see that Google is in front of many other SEs in pioneering new technologies (dynamic urls etc..), but I sometimes feel sad for those people who are trying to create more beautiful, userfriendly internet and just aren't being recognized in the search results.
Interested to see what people think..
For example, many people may theoretically have *access* to high speed Internet at school or at work, but presumably not supposed to be goofing off looking at Nike shoes. And server logs may exaggerate the number of high speed users for the simple reason that you can look at 3 or 4 or 5 times as many pages in the same amount of time.
If i could just make one more small contribution here it is that Google is "not" the Web. Sure at this point in time, it DOES dominate the free-indexing search engine sector, and due to the interests of many people in WebmasterWorld is on SEO, getting indexed by SEO for "free" is the focus. Because of that it seems to us that google dominates. But in the broad veiw of things free indexing is not as dominant an activity when viewed with other promotion vehicles and ways of getting visibility such as PPC, PPI, links, off line advertising, word of mouth etc.
And it is likely that at the moment Google is at the peak of its dominance, even in that specific sector. There are better alternatives now for searchers than even 12 months ago for example. And my prediction is that free indexing though SEO will become a less dominant part of the promotion mix for webmasters, even those who hang out in WebmasterWorld, though of course remaining and important and valuable activity.
Given that perspective, IMHO, Google is NOT stopping the web from developing, and in many ways, is actually helping it..
For example Google didnt stop Nike from developing their shoe labs site. And it seems many others who are using "modern" web design techniques and technologies such as Flash as only one small example, are not being discouraged either. In the end if you are willing to fork out the significant costs for paying for the Flash software, add-ons and staff training to use it well, the budget required for paying for exposure via PPC and PFI may well seem less significant. And remember, there are ways to get these things indexed, via the methods i decscribed before, incoming hypertext links, page titles, alt text maybe, text links from other parts of your sites and so on.
