Online Merchants Find Problems With Google:
"Google may be popular, but it gets its share of complaints. Merchants quibble when their sites rank poorly, while some users say the popularity-based ranking system shuts out useful, but little-known sites. "

Because a site scores higher the more other sites link to it—an indication of popularity—independent films are less likely than Hollywood blockbusters to appear in results, said Dragomir Radev, an information studies professor at the University of Michigan.

Newer and foreign sites may also be difficult to find because they are not as well known by the U.S.-centric Internet population.…

as Google's popularity grew, so did attempts to fool it. A cottage industry developed around search engine optimization to share tricks for ranking higher.

One early trick involved buying hundreds of domain names and having them link to one another to mimic popularity. As Google closed one loophole, webmasters found others.

Pranksters have figured out that they, too, could game the system, so that typing "miserable failure" gets you President Bush's biography, even though neither word appears on the page.…

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1556008,00.asp?kc=EWNWS032904DTX1K0000599