"Search and Destroy" in this week's New Yorker

I generally don't count on The New Yorker to give me business or tech news -- it always seems a year or two behind -- but I always read The Financial Page by James Surowiecki, which follows Talk of the Town. This week it's called "Search and Destroy" and in it he writes about Google-bombing and Google's dependency on the collective intelligence of the web, and the inevitable gaming of the system that takes place when each link is treated as a "vote" for the linked-to site. This is all old news to most of us, but this sentence really struck me:

The more important Google becomes, the harder its job gets, because more and more people find themselves trying to game the system, and wind up undermining it instead.

It's funny. I'd long considered the comment spammers, and link farmers and Google-bombers to be undermining search, but I'd never considered the people and businesses who are defensively engaging the same activities because they have to in order to stay competitive, and how this creates a situation that makes Google results increasingly valueless. And I assume that legitimate businesses engaging in these practices are even more numerous than the "search optimizers". Surowiecki writes:

Google works best when no one knows it's there -- when people are making their own decisions about which sites are useful or good. The more important Google becomes, the harder its job gets, because more and more people find themselves trying to game the system, and wind up undermining it instead. When Google purges dubious Web sites and rejects links from link farms, it is, in a sense, counteracting the consequences of its own success. Collective intelligence relies on a certain degree of innocence. Google is using guile to re-create a guileless world, under the assumption that what we don't know should help us

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