Only Losers Gripe About Google Opus 1

"The only people who gripe about Google have sites that rank poorly."

This may or may not be true. However, the only people I heard gripe about Vietnam when I was growing up were Vietnam vets, and this didn't change the fact that Vietnam sucked.

Regarding Google in general, the concept sounds great; it sounds like a "democracy": let the people decide. "Lest we forget," democracy in its purest form is mob rule and allows for lynchings and genocide. From what I learned in high school (and from what common sense tells me) the United States is not a pure democracy, and therefore when popular opinion is to, for example, lynch African Americans who are just minding their own business, there are laws that prevent this (now, anyway).

Google doesn't set limits like the United States does. Google does not say, "Let's take sites that obviously deserve to rank high and rank them high, and as far as all the other sites and pages we don't know about, well, let the people decide." Google says let the people decide no matter what, and by "people," I mean "people" who have relevant sites and who may have childhood issues that prevent them from linking to good sites when they know it's the right thing to do. There's a whole 'nother story there, by the way, but I just got through watching the news and I've had my fill of stupid people for one evening. (Besides, if someone doesn't want to link to my site because he or she thinks I'm a dildo, why should he or she have to link to it just to make the world better? A person's site is private and none of my business, and although I saved many lives as a doctor in the Boer War I hate playing God.) I'll just say that if there are 60,000 results for a particular topic, ten websites devoted to this topic (or super-related), seven of which are corporate sites that don't link to jack, one is yours, and the other two are owned by ninnies who are threatened by a new Bubba Zanetti site or who don't like that you won't play patty-cakes in their lame-ass forums, YOU ARE SCREWED, period, thanks very much.

The numbers and situation I just shared accurately reflect a real-world case that I'm quite familiar with, but not involving the person and site I mention later. Don't you just love being able to edit your posts? These numbers are VERY typical for the subject matter my friends, my family, and I normally are involved with.

Incidentally, by "sites that obviously deserve to rank high," I mean that if a page is the home page for a hosting account/website that is the ONLY site for a topic, please ... let it rank in the top 900 for that topic. I mean come on.

By the way, I don't think Google sucks, because I know how it works and when it will suit me; as far as I'm concerned it's like a gun, a camera, or a banana peel: neither good nor evil. If I'm searching for a site that I'm confident your average bourgeois moron who owns a relevant site can judge, that's fine. And believe me, this is a good percentage of my searches! What I think sucks is the fact that people like to pretend they're smart and make themselves feel better by lowering others (newcomers mostly), telling them ridiculous lies like "sites that don't have inbound links aren't worth anything" and "if a site is good, the rest will happen automatically."

Uttered as blanket statements, these are among the dumbest, most obviously untrue things I have ever heard in my life.

I have to wonder why anyone would come to Google's aid and defend it; it's not like Google needs defending. People have many different reasons for doing things, but I've found that (after some curious digging) a lot of people who defend Google are relatively nice, smart people who had to work their asses off getting inbound links (when they knew deep down inside their sites were good and should be judged in themselves, by their content...) and now have a chip on their shoulders: IF I HAD TO GO THROUGH THAT, WHY NOT EVERYONE? Just an observation.

For the record, my response here isn't "about me," but someone I think is cool who has a worthy site that ranks for sh**.

It's also about trying to sift through all the keyword-trap-garbage and find pictures of Jill Hennessy.