Warning: contrarian rant ahead.

Something has been bugging me for a while, and it took a few hours after I read this article to figure out what it was.

I love the coining of a new term: "organized spam", and I love calling out things that are wrong, but I wonder if we're not taking this crime metaphor a bit too far.

Look guys, it's a search engine. You type in a search term, it gives you results. There's nothing magic or special about it -- anybody with a smidgen of database training can make one (although nowhere near as Google's, granted)

Although some of these examples involve people ripping other people off, I get the feeling that somehow Google has become such a part of our lives that we feel as if somehow these folks trading links and trying to get attention are acting criminally. That anything that gets in the way of my getting instant information is a crime against humanity. That really bugs me.

It's not. Get over yourself. Sure, large parts of this may be well-funded, but there's nothing necessarily criminal going on. For instance lots of poor people in lots of third-world countries are making money dropping by my blog each day and telling me how awesome I am. It's not expected, but I'm happy they're making a few dollars. I can live with the inconvenience or try to fix it on my end. I don't need to blame them.

I don't like the state of Google search right now either, although I'm still a loyal customer. But what I see in the marketplace is humans reacting logically to their best interests. If you're going to monetize google search so that billions of dollars flows through it, there's going to be some ancillary effects that nobody predicted. Instead of blaming the people, understand that the people are just regular, intelligent folks doing the best they can. Hell, my wife is in a social group with a lady who made several thousand dollars adding advertiser text to her blogs -- until Google delisted her. She saw nothing wrong with it, and still is pretty pissed at Google. From her standpoint Google crapped all over her party.

And yes, Google has every right to delist sites and such. More power to them. I hope they continue to delist and evolve their search engine. I hope they get a handle on this. But I think we should all separate our well-wishes for Google's success from our opinions of our fellow man. I've heard linkspammers and spammers called "subhuman" and all sorts of nasty things. While there are criminals who are trying to rip you off, there's no evidence that there are more criminals on the web that anywhere else. Most of these people are trying to make a living. The fact they might inconvenience you on your way to get an answer to a technical question or find the latest mp3 you have to have is really not that high on their list of priorities -- nor should it be.

Google needs to do a better job. Period. There seems to be this "conversation machine" right now where people post articles showing how bad search is, then folks come out and rant, then Google makes an announcement. Repeat and rinse. It's as if we went down to the local newstand and asked the grocer for a magazine on trucks. He gives us a bunch of magazines on boats, so -- we blame the magazine publishers! It's simply not logical. A little perspective, please. Google is the provider here and those of us who like them should try to help out. But we shouldn't cross the line into thinking that anybody that annoys Google or searcher is somehow evil or criminal. That's crazy. Much better to understand people as rational actors than to demonize anybody who tricks some random American internet company.

</rant>