While I agree with the premises that (a) doctoring the search results is killing the golden goose and (b) Google is essentially just a big advertising compan

While I agree with the premises that (a) doctoring the search results is killing the golden goose and (b) Google is essentially just a big advertising company The reality is that even with watered down results they are still better than their competitors. If I want to search MSDN then Google gives better results than Bing. Think about that for a moment. How can Bing be a serious competitor to Google when they can't even search their own site properly??? So I think that there is some wriggle room for Google here. They can water the beer down... but it is still better than the cow piss the pub down the road is serving.