It seems to me they are heading towards being the police force. Who gave them the job? Who gives them the right to judge which paid links are bad, and which are good? We the searchers do. We use their service to search the web.

The trouble is, there’s other search engines out there which can give just as good if not better results. If Google annoy people, people will move to different search engines.

Google may well get what they want, but it might be at the cost of everything they have worked so hard for. People will become anti-google, and they will steer well clear of them. And some smart internet marketer will come along and create something even better, and there will be enough people annoyed with Google that they will start using it, and they will tell their friends, they will blog about it. Who will that person be? That’s the only question.

The blogosphere is a powerful force, we’ve all seen that. Buzz can do a lot for a company. Bad buzz can do a lot to hurt a company.

I guess we’ll have to wait and see. But I don’t think it is a good business decision to p*ss bloggers off. That’s my opinion.

Snoskred

I know Sam isn’t too keen on PPP, but in many ways selling pure site-wide links is much worse for the search engines.

The interesting situation is the way they are flipping what the toolbar pagerank means – they have turned it into a link buying guide, it is useless now for end users to use as any indicator of quality.