'Some people must have benefited from Panda' Largely 2 groups of sites did - big brands & big media sites / sites with plenty of "brand" signal - smallish site

'Some people must have benefited from Panda' Largely 2 groups of sites did - big brands & big media sites / sites with plenty of "brand" signal - smallish sites that were too small to get clipped when a lot of the larger (but not BIG BRAND large) sites in their vertical got hit. 'I wonder what the logical conclusion of search engines/SEO and all this jazz will be in 10 years. If history is any indicator, we'll all swing back to some AOL-esque, walled garden, ad-driven existence where "Search" means nothing more than "find applicable ads"... I suppose that is somewhat true now.' That is a great point...and in Tim Wu's book I mentioned above, he highlighted how this was the big fundamental strategic difference between Google & Apple. The answer to how it all turns out is still a bit unknown.