Looking at search today it almost seems like google has lost focus on good search results. The ongoing war against SE spam has changed search technology to the extent that many legitimate webmasters are seeing their sites caught up by friendly fire. Although in saying this many of the webmasters that cry the loudest are the ones breaking the rules and pushing the boundaries. Google is smart and plenty of people like to take pot shots at the tall poppy of the search world but I would not want the responsibility of trying to manage and police the worlds biggest search tool. When you look at what they have to contend with in terms of spam in the form of scraper sites and massive amounts of duplicate content, throw in data storage and crawling on an ever increasing.

Looking around at SEO forums you read all sorts of things about a google conspiracy and webmasters being forced to buy adwords because they simply can't get the volume of traffic from organic search any more. What many webmasters are seeing today is pages drop from the google index on large scale and a constant shifting of the results across the different google data centers, also large numbers of supplemental results being reported for sites. Corresponding drops in traffic and very upset webmasters who are caught in the fallout, in some ways Google is the victim of it's own dominance as are the many webmasters who catch a cold when google has a sneeze.