[eropple]

This is trivializing to the point of absurdity. When it comes to doing business on the Internet in the English-speaking world, Google is the basket. It's the only basket. I wish it weren't, but it is.

And so, yes, pretty much everyone is reliant on them to be good stewards of the power they possess. (Whether they are or not is orthogonal to that the quilter in question has a pretty good reason to feel like they aren't.)

[true_religion]

I really can't agree with that. We've built businesses in the pre-Google days when search engines were a hit or miss affair.

[eropple]

Except that now everyone goes to Google. It's not just a search engine, it's literally the starting point for the overwhelming majority of web traffic.

If Google is against you, you're done.