[prodigal_erik]

He's talking about lying to search engine operators to trick users into seeing different content than they actually wanted. That's not capital-E Evil, but certainly unethical, wasting those users' time and making everyone's search results less useful.

[mroman]

No, he's not talking about that. Please quote him on it if he is.

[prodigal_erik]

> a technology that serves different content to search engine spiders and to human visitors, based on visitors' (human or otherwise) IP address. This requires special software (such as the stuff we have developed, hint, hint!)

> You can now optimize those phantom pages for better search engine rankings at your own discretion, and noone will be the wiser.

Deceiving the search engine to tamper with its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught.

> users can always, and actually will, vote with their mice on whether your site's high ranking was justified and relevant to their search

They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users.

> Ethical behavior only makes sense amongst equals.

And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in another tragedy of the commons.

[mroman]

Ah, I finally got a reply link to your post.

"Deceiving the search engine to affect its decisions is an explicit goal, as is not getting caught."

Indeed. Yet that obviously does not automatically imply deceiving the users, as you erroneously stated earlier. Doing so would be stupid, as in serving up porn for bridge search results, for example.

"They acknowledge causing bad decisions from the search engine and irrelevant results for users."

Incorrect. You misunderstood what he stated. By saying "vote with their mice" he is referring to whether or not users purchase products or otherwise "convert". Granted, this interview does not cover his stance on DECEIVING the users. The following one does:

http://www.searchethos.com/fantomaster-response.html

"Deceptive cloaking (again: solely viewed from the surfer's perspective) is self-defeating"

"And they're untrustworthy scum, which is why they're eagerly participating in the tragedy of the commons."

Interesting that you would drag morality into an exclusively technological issue. I won't address this, as it has no place in this discussion.

[prodigal_erik]

They are deliberately making search results less useful. If this became widespread we would have to abandon search engines entirely. That's the same as the ethical argument against spam.