As a user I care whether Google finds me the most relevant results from the biggest haystack or whether it editorialises those results - it's a big distinction. By that measure I'd say they definitely _shouldn't_ be penalising sites for finding loopholes in their algorithms but should simply close those holes up.
nknighthb|12 years ago
I'm confident in this assertion because people have, at various times, claimed that other search engines provide them more relevant results, yet for me, those search engines almost always failed to even match Google, and never exceeded it.
This was also the case pre-Google -- e.g. lots of people swore by AltaVista, but I almost never used it, because it never seemed to work well for me. I actually remained primarily a WebCrawler user for quite a while, right up until settling into Google in the 1999~2000 timeframe.
I don't want to be limited to search engines that provide what some bureaucrat has decided are the most relevant and/or neutral results. I want to be able to choose the search engine that provides the most relevant results for me, and I have seen no evidence that what's relevant for one person is necessarily relevant for everyone else.
dreamfactory|12 years ago
That is precisely my point.
(And if you are looking for personalisation, an algorithm isn't necessarily counter to that but a global smack-ban on behaviours most certainly is.)