If Dave Winer didn’t exist, someone would have to invent him. Dave’s company, Userland, makes products so good at doing search that Winer uses Google for searching his own blog. Nonetheless, that doesn’t stop Winer from not only criticizing Google for failing to implement non-trivial features, but goes on to suggest that Google is intentionally trying to destroy blogs (emphasis added),
It’s very true that Google has failed to keep up with the “search engine optimization” tricks that cause links to porn sites to show up on our Referers pages and blog post comments. As we’ve said here several times, and thought many more, Google is the place where this practice should be stopped. It’s because of Google that our sites are littered with links to these offensive sites that have nothing to do with ours. If they’re smart enough to come up with tricks like Google News and Local Google, why can’t their search engine recognize comment and referer spam and not use it in determining page rank? Of course they can. Why don’t they? I’d love to hear an explanation. Better yet, I’d love to see them fix it. It’s a bug in Google’s software.
Maybe secretly Google really doesn’t like blogs. Maybe it’s not so secret. They still haven’t deigned to support the standard format for syndication, as every other tech company and major publisher has. Why Google has a stake in breaking the standard is another puzzle. How does this relate to Don’t Be Evil. We’ve asked this question a few times, only to be met with the usual Google stone wall.
When Google News first came out, Dave derided it as defective. Now it’s so good, its evidence that Google really doesn’t want to stop search engine optimization tactics.
I could go on about how Google usually get slammed by people, including Winer, when it tweaks its algorithms to try to deal with those trying to game the system, but the site of Dave complaining about a vendor being slow to fix a bug is simply too much to get past.