+Alistair Lattimore My gripe isn't with ranking.  Sure it's a zero sum game, so there's always a winner for every loser.  My particular gripe is that Google is increasingly putting itself at #1, and in some extreme cases barely showing anyone else.  That's what's gone wrong here.  Google's goal is no longer to help me find what I want, but instead seems to be ever-more about finding me what makes Google the most revenue.  IMO they're putting the cart in front of the horse, and it will be their undoing (hopefully).

In terms of competition: imagine if Amazon rolled out a new A9 which covered all public shopping results.  Then they blocked Google from crawling/indexing their sites.  Now imagine what happens when searchers cant find Amazon goods via Google.  Do you think they'll blame Amazon or Google?  This to me is seems the most likely way a competitor can come close to affecting the balance of power as it now stands.

This is like the discussions we've had on DSQ with +Jim Munro  regarding collateral damage as part of an algorithm change.

While Google does genuinely care about the quality of the search results, I don't think they care (nor should they necessarily) about who is at the top so long as the top is objectively decided as being the best for users of Google.

When someone falls down, another website will rise up. There will also be more websites than there are top 10 or top 1000 positions for virtually every keyword known to man & given the internet is still expanding at a great rate of knots like the universe, Google aren't going to be running out of websites to rank in the highest click through rate positions anytime soon.

I feel that the "good content" message as espoused by Mr Cutts and Mr Fishkin (feeling guilty maybe?) is hollow, we've seen it all before during web design v SEO.

I have noticed this more and more, less and less real estate for organic searches!

Will read the article in a bit