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You've said this before about Google, but I only just now realized what you're getting at: What's to say that my (hypothetical) site that shows up #9 on Google

• patio11 16y ago
  Right. (Sorry if I didn't make that explicit before: I take for granted that SEO can provide value for users, too.) A very optimistic person could say that the search results are due not just to Google's algorithms but the cooperation of Google's algorithms and webmasters optimizing for them, and that without both of these elements, the Internet would be a much poorer place than it is currently. One example is meta description tags. That is useful for site owners (good snippets increase CTR), useful for users (good snippets make the search results magically better by telling you what you're going to get before the click), and useful for Google. Good meta description tags only exist because of SEOs and do not follow under the frequently argued "Meh, that is just a common web usability guideline" shibboleth. To the best of my knowledge no common user agent surfaces them anywhere users can see them. They exist because they're used for search engine result pages, and that's all.