It seems to me that this article barely mentions, and grossly underestimates, the increase in traffic to an individual/company/merchant's page as a result of getting indexed by a search engine. It says that this is the flipside, but then says it is outweighed by the reduced value of individual sites. Maybe that will be true in the future, but currently if you want any details, you usually have to go to the site as the search engine contains just a snippet (search results) or a summary (i.e. Google News).

The vast majority of sites are essentially hidden unless a search engine indexes their content. If such action constitutes a leech, what is a domain name server that assists people in finding a web server with a unique IP?

search engines democratize the content on the web. Without search we would have to rely on a few small networks to showcase content to us.

this guy sounds like an overzealous protectionist.

But then again, to search one has to spier the web/ crawl the site and then index content correct ?? What matters most is not those techniques. Rather the ranking and display of pages..

you know that at one time, the term "Abu Grahib" did not return any pages or images via google ?? Why, this was a sensitive topic!!!

search engines leave out most andi labour the point most of the websites that an individual spends months creating

The article makes a good point that I've found myself as somebody who is self-employed and who's income is tied to my 2 websites. Organic SEO is much more difficult than it was even 2 years ago because many small/medium sites can't compete with the PPC paid out by larger sites, so they now spend more time and effort on the regular SERPS. Rather than be 95% dependent on Google for traffic and revenue, it's imperative to branch out with methods such as is discussed in the article.

Also, I disagree witht he poster above that Search Engines necessarily democratize the web.

Most search traffic is from Yahoo and Google and they have their own proprietary search algos that present you with the "answer" to your questions. But it's not democratic--it's their proprietary results based on their proprietary formula.

Just from the small snippet of the article, it sounded to me like a revolution against search engines rises with small steps....

(my 2 cents)

> you know that at one time, the term "Abu Grahib"
> did not return any pages or images via google ??

Pd, to be more precisely it did return pages and images... only the images weren't the one everyone was talking about at that time (because Google Images updates so slowly).