Frank Schilling and Shoemoney recently had two great posts about Google. When combined I think they paint a picture of Google that skips past the rhetoric and double talk. Frank said:
As a publisher, I’ve always viewed Google as a bit of a predator in this context.. taking publishers in, convincing them to serve Google [...]

MSN Search Update
MSN announced they are upgrading relevancy and coverage. The increased coverage likely means that more inbound link sources are getting indexed. From looking at rankings of a few of my sites it looks like:

anchor text got A LOT more weighting
many lower authority links that were not passing weight (due to not being [...]

As noticed by Dave, some of the Google search suggestions are leading to thin affiliate sites. See generic viagra or generic valium for example.
As shortcusts and search suggestions get more advanced and more common they are going to be cheap traffic sources for those who understand the engines well enough to benefit from them. [...]

Radiohead announced that you can pay whatever you like for In Rainbows, the latest album from the best band in the world. A TIME article states:
Thom Yorke told TIME, “I like the people at our record company, but the time is at hand when you have to ask why anyone needs one. And, yes, [...]

Buying Attention & Building Trust
With content that you freely distribute you are primarily trying to build relationships with people who don’t know you and have never bought from you. Since attention is limited you have to make your content accessible to gain market attention.
Highbrow = Low Readership
Most potential buyers can not distinguish between great information [...]

Ad Age’s A Sign of Things to Come? mentioned that the city of São Paulo banned outdoor advertising, and the movement is picking up steam elsewhere.
São Paulo made history by banning ads on billboards, neon signs and electronic panels, and now Rio de Janeiro is considering a similar measure.

Advertising on the web is not yet [...]

Webmasters currently face link rot as a major website maintenance problem. As we rely more on Google and other third parties for features such as hosting, ads, and content syndication what happens when some of the business relationships that are opening up content fall away or search engines reorganize and rebrand their offerings?
A few [...]

Justin Laing recently emailed me to let me know about his SEO sitefinder tool, which uses the ODP and the Internet Archive to find DMOZ listed websites that have not been updated in a while.
Domain Tools also allows you to find expiring domains that will be up at auction soon. You can view their [...]

Some Things Only Spread Because Who is Behind Them
I recently created an Internet marketing mind map and published it on my tools subdomain with a link to it from tools.seobook.com, but nobody mentioned it. A few days later I blogged about it on SeoBook.com and dozens of webmasters linked to it. Same publisher, same content, [...]

Google tries to scare you away from renting links, but their paid link detection algorithms are at best laughable. Which is why Matt Cutts puts so much effort into trying to scare you about bought links.
_________.com has repetitive and near machine generated sounding content, like
Loan calculators are made of different calculation types. In fact, [...]