SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first. That is not the entire purpose of SEO. There's good sites o

SEO: When you cut through all the BS, the entire goal here is to make a less good match come first. That is not the entire purpose of SEO. There's good sites out there that don't provide their content in a way that can be indexed by spiders. SEO often solves that. There certainly are plenty of people making bad websites and trying to make them rank, it's Google's job to weed out the useless information. People still collect links (shameless self promotion: http://internetmindmap.com http://internetmindmap.com ), they still have huge blogrolls, there are human powered search engines, a vast amount of directories for every imaginable niche... Google doesn't need the perfect page of 100 links and I doubt it ever did. Your mashed potatos example does not make sense. Google gave you generic info for your generic search query. How is that bad? Now the fact that certain sites dominate a very wide range of search queries, is an interesting point. Personally, I would just add a sidebar or something similar, to be occupied by the "staple" sites, such as wikipedia, about.com etc.