kvmcable, thanks for bringing up the reference on monopoly in the USA. As an older geek, I've seen several such practices fought by the US authorities, Microsoft was an infamous one in the 90's and early 2000's with their bundling of Internet Explorer. Windows had 90% market share, so bundling IE in Windows was instant 90% market share for IE. Still one of the worst browsers around, and we pay the price for it: to this very day, writing compatible CSS is a PITA because that monopoly was never seriously broken by the US. Their agreement after a decade in court was a slap in the wrist for MSFT.
Google is doing the exact same thing Microsoft did with IE, except they do it with their search results: they have a major position in the market(80% or so) and they abuse that freely. I don't know what Google's partnership is with some of the major players, but I feel that a lot of the SERPs we see today are not entirely "organic", but of course I can't prove that.
UrsuAke, you make several good points there. First of all, I'm not upset at jazzc at all. I see where he's coming from, and we disagree. I just didn't like it how he implied I wanted freebies from Google and such, IMO Google got lots of "freebies" and cooperation from webmasters, especially in other forums - and several of those webmasters who cooperated with Google in the early days truly regret it today : because Google didn't care once they grew and some of those webmasters got bit hard.
Google's algorithm is genius because it is based on scientific citations. The more cited papers are likely to contain fewer errors, and are likely to be more relevant. THAT was the Eureka moment at Google : seeing the WWW as a graph(see the graph now, jazzc), and the nodes with more arrows pointing in are more authoritative. The arrows can contain a search term, thus nodes become relevant for a certain term - this was an improvement in later versions of Pagerank. In the early days you could blast a billion links to any URL and they'd rank for whatever.
It just so happens that even in the scientific community, citations are gamed. Scientists with similar ideological views gather around each other and cite each other heavily. It is EXACTLY what we see on the WWW today.
BUT. Is any scientific body forbidding or censoring those citations today? They're not! It's gotta remain free, and scientists being smart guys they are, are free to judge whether the amount of citations is deserved or not.
That's not what Google does in the WWW, unfortunately, and that's at the root of my discontent.
Google isn't free to do whatever they want to the WWW. Just as a farmer isn't free to ruin a whole rainforest so he can grow corn. There are rules in place against the kinds of practices we see Google enforcing all the time. Matt Cutts does not have the right to control links on the WWW. The only reason he can do it is because of Google's monopolistic position in the search market. Google did not invent the WWW, they own no patents on links or the WWW itself and thus they are not free to "curate" it, in Matt Cutts' own words.
Basically, Matt Cutts and Google are trying to control "online citations" so that their algorithm works. It should be the other way around, they should adapt to whatever happens on the WWW and still keep their algorithm working. And THAT, us black hats have proven time and again, THEY CAN'T DO.
When Google realized they can't outsmart us, they invented "disavow links", "nofollow links" and several other policies that distort the graph of the WWW completely. Now, if someone receives links, it's THEIR fault! They've inverted responsibilities. So how does Google find out who's linking to who? They spy on emails, on web traffic, they monitor analytics and shit so they know webmaster A is the guy who placed link to B and it wasn't B's own SEO efforts. See? That's where the nefarious spying comes in, once more. Google's reading SEO's Gmail to find link networks, if you doubt it, then explain their laser precision strikes on several sellers on the BST's who used Gmail for link trade. We don't have to go very far, just ask yourself : if you were Google, and Gmail belongs to you, why on Earth wouldn't you use Gmail to your favor?
Now, if it were just the SEO monopoly, we wouldn't be here "bitching at Google" (in jazzc's very own words). The fact is, us webmasters have seen Google's policies from the inside of WWW marketing. As UrsuAke put it, we are 0.00001% of the world. But we, the 0.00001% have seen it.... So we, the irrelevant 0.00001%, have the right to chime in.
Because the exact same practices Google is enforcing on the WWW, WILL be enforced in "self driving cars", "spy glass" and their creepy ass "social network" Google+, AKA Google's human lab for ad sales.
