[lmm]

> Who are you to determine what a low quality website is?

Who is Google to? Google is no more neutral or accountable than SEO folk, and is just as much a profit-oriented business as they are.

Google makes the rules and the rest of us play by them. And surprisingly enough, Google encourages the behaviour it rewards. If Google's policies are pro-evil I'd rather that evil be done by competent, organized professionals (who will be able to turn it off when Google changes its policies to something better, and who create a somewhat level playing field, even if it's everyone paying rent to an SEO expert) than haphazardly by a bunch of amateurs.

[jacquesm]

Feel free to build you own search engine! The more the merrier, especially if they can get up to the scale of Google. Monoculture is bad, especially when monoculture leads to diseases attacking the one strain that dominates.

On the other hand we could of course try to (reaching here) argue that these SEO's improve google because they are forcing it to up its game but I think the web as a whole would be better off without all this crap.

Theory: when a new dominant search engine emerges ways will be found to game it to such an extent that the damage to the web offsets any gains from the increased ability to find content.

[lmm]

> we could of course try to (reaching here) argue that these SEO's improve google because they are forcing it to up its game but I think the web as a whole would be better off without all this crap.

The alternative is what, that the result you'd get for, I don't know, "home insurance" would be essentially random?

Google has some opinion on what properties the best result for that would have. Sites will naturally conform to the google policy (which is good when google promotes things that are good for the general web, like fast load times and accessible markup, and bad when google promotes things that are bad for the general web). The SEO industry just makes this process more efficient, meaning changes to what Google "wants" in results take effect faster. Even if Google's policies were effectively random (which I don't think they are), the worst-case result would be that businesses who paid attention to keeping their SEO up to date would appear higher in search results than businesses which didn't - which is at least some kind of barometer of a healthy business.