> Also, how can a search category be SEO’d into ruin? Isn’t search engine optimization supposed to produce “better results”? Doesn’t Google exclusively contro

> Also, how can a search category be SEO’d into ruin? Isn’t search engine optimization supposed to produce “better results”? Doesn’t Google exclusively control the results it displays… This seems almost willfully naive. Why would SEO produce better results for the searcher? It’s optimizing rankings for sites who want to appear higher up in the results. Of course SEO is going to degrade the results. Of course every site on the planet is going to try to game Google search and appear higher in the list. Yes there are conflict of interest issues between serving high quality search results and making money serving ads in those results, and yes Google is consciously allowing some of this to happen. BUT - this was inevitable. Any popular search engine is going to be gamed by the entire rest of the world, and the scale is too large for Google to control it. Michael might not be aware that, despite the conflicts of interest, Google really does spend considerable amounts of time fighting against search-degrading SEO?