Is Google looking to make more money?

[Duncan Pollock]

I do not believe for one moment that Google or any other search engine has a desire for pages to be constructed in a natural or unnatural manner, but that they simply don't care.
They do not want excessive manipulation of their algorithm so that non relevant pages rank highly but other than that you are free to do as you please.
IMO search engines do not care if you have a great looking site with lots of good things for your visitors, the very best eye candy or the latest flash twists, or if you do things naturally (I would love to see a definition of what is natural and what is not), or if you have great content etc etc.
Search engines have one and only one goal:
To deliver searchers to the most relevant pages for the search terms.
To the best of my knowledge, search engines have no feelings or emotions; they simply rank pages based on a mathmatical and logical algorithm in an attempt to determine the relevancy of a page to a paricular query.
Yes, if you want your visitors to be happy you will have to develop attractive pages that are useful to them, but that should not be confused with search engine rankings.
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Mel Nelson

In the "Reciprocal links" forum Mel pontificated as above, and I DO agree with him.
In fact, if you go to the paper "The Anatomy of a Search Engine" that Brin and Serge wrote in their early days of Google, they said as follows:

Since it is very difficult even for experts to evaluate search engines, search engine bias is particularly insidious. A good example was OpenText, which was reported to be selling companies the right to be listed at the top of the search results for particular queries [Marchiori 97]. This type of bias is much more insidious than advertising, because it is not clear who "deserves" to be there, and who is willing to pay money to be listed. This business model resulted in an uproar, and OpenText has ceased to be a viable search engine. But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. This of course erodes the advertising supported business model of the existing search engines. However, there will always be money from advertisers who want a customer to switch products, or have something that is genuinely new. But we believe the issue of advertising causes enough mixed incentives that it is crucial to have a competitive search engine that is transparent and in the academic realm.

This leads me to think that whatever else the recent (and seemingly still ongoing) switcharoos have as an objective it certainly isn't to let PPC results outweight the "natural" ones. Perhaps B & P have changed their mind, but I very much doubt it.
Duncan

[Mel]

I totally agree Duncan. Common sense tells you that if a search engine does not deliver relevant results to the user they will go somewhere else to find the information they are searching for.

If Google or any other search engine gets so wrapped up in trying to defeat manipulation of thier results (which IMO we are seeing at the present) that thier relevancy suffers they are on the way to becoming a second rate resource.

Google has developed one of the best methods of delivering targeted advertising to users at the time they are interested in it, and have repeatedly stated that the Adwords and search are independant and in no way interconnected.

I suspect that the current less than optimal results we are seeing from Google at the moment are the result of 150 PHDs trying to make the algorithm manipulation proof as opposed to any dark desire to increase profits at the expense of relevancy.

Strange that only those whose sites do not rank well seem to favor conspiracy theories.