Bit of a backlog here from when blogger was down...
fantomNews - the ultimate search engine optimization know how on fantomaster.com! Archives - 2003-11-03: "puts the issue of Google's search
dominance (or, as many will have it: monopoly) in a
global, political perspective"

Here's a fairly telling quote:
"If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing,
and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep
your mouth shut and hope for the best. That's what
Google is doing. The other problem is that geeks have a
poor record on social ethics, and Google is very geeky.
They don't know what the word 'public interest' means;
it's completely outside their frame of reference. Most
of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a
philosophical principle if they ran over one in their
SUVs. It's all binary to them - either they're gaining
market share or they're losing it."
He also lets on about getting kicked from the Webmaster
World Forum some months back for taking a somewhat too
pronounced anti-Google stance. Interesting.

Read the full Counterpunch interview here:

Mark Hand: Searching for Daniel Brandt: "Searching for Daniel Brandt"

Lately, Brandt has been leading an opposition against what he calls the "hegemony" of the Google search engine. On his Google Watch website, Brandt says his struggle against the search engine's ranking system "feels like the right thing to do. It's the cyber equivalent of my draft resistance days...
It's always a moving target, and the game isn't always fair. But it's the only game on the Internet these days. Many webmasters who follow the situation are hopeful that Yahoo's recent acquisition of Inktomi will mean that Google may see some competition in 2003. Presently Inktomi provides results for the MSN network, and that may change as well.

To give you an idea of the scale involved with respect to search engines, from 1995 to 2000 we averaged about 300 page accesses, or name searches, per day. Recently we've been doing over 15,000 per day...

Brandt: No, Google is not responsive to public criticism. Rumor has it that they may file an IPO [initial public offering] in 2003, which could introduce some new variables into the equation. I have never heard directly from Google about anything. They use robots to answer email, so I'll just keep on nagging them, like a robot. I have noticed that other webmasters agree with me more often these days. Only six months ago I was a lone voice in the wilderness. I got kicked off of one of the webmaster (www.webmasterworld.com) forums for being too anti-Google. But recently I've felt that a fair number of webmasters have come around to my position on Google.

Still, this has had no effect whatsoever on Google. If you have a 75 percent monopoly, and it's growing, and perhaps there's an IPO around the corner, you keep your mouth shut and hope for the best. That's what Google is doing. The other problem is that geeks have a poor record on social ethics, and Google is very geeky. They don't know what the word "public interest" means; it's completely outside their frame of reference. Most of those PhDs at Google wouldn't recognize a philosophical principle if they ran over one in their SUVs. It's all binary to them--either they're gaining market share or they're losing it. If they're gaining, then all is well with the world. Ethics is too fuzzy a concept for Silicon Valley geeks.

PageRank is very important. The smaller you are, the lower your PageRank, and the more desperate you become to get Google to steer traffic to you. At the moment it's do or die with PageRank. I'm hopeful that things will loosen up in 2003 somehow, perhaps with some new competition from Yahoo."

greyed link pages
Very many link pages seem to be greyed out in PageRank - Best Practices Search Engine Forums: "Very many link pages seem to be greyed out in PageRank "

opping for the UK Marketing To The Uk -> High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "marketing to the UK"