As Marshall McLuhan, many regard as the Prophet of the Electronic Age, reminds us, "Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force."

News of Google entering the payment arena broke in the third week of June 2005. This author's article "Search Engine Wars - a Different Perspective", two weeks earlier, made some allusion to it.

Google and Yahoo plans to index all classified ads from online newspapers. Readers can easily draw some useful conclusions.

Hints from Mountain View suggest that if your site does not accept ads from you-know-who, your site's rankings may tank. Readers can then deduce there are a limited number of popular keywords and with a growing list of ads, they have to find lots of Internet real estate (web sites) fast as outlets.

This author's take

Does anyone notice that Google News favor a few European sites and a Middle-eastern site? Is politics also a criterion in rankings?

This author's site received its PR ranking on Bastille Day, 2005. A day later, the ranking dropped a notch. This evidence clearly made nonsense of some Google's spokesperson official statement the rankings are updated once in a few months. Perhaps, it is just another day from DMV (Drunkards of Mountain View) as Joe Nogood stated. [Shame on you if you have not read this master class (well, almost master class) tutorial on keywords and relevancy written with original jokes. The folks at Redmond and Sunnyvale voted it as the best article of the year - just joking.]

Yahoo and MSN correctly favored originating sites when it comes to ranking same documents like free-reprint articles. Google has different ideas on origin sites - maybe, there is some truth that its search engine runs on burgundy, brandy and so forth - their search engines on occasion becomes tipsy. Is Google really serious on promoting original content?

MSN is the fastest when indexing new documents. However, after a week, Google inevitably will catch up and index more documents than MSN. Does the MSN search engine runs on Iraqi oil?

Search engines are works-in-progress. Compare this to the history of Windows - 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 3.10, 3.11. WfWg, 95, 95OSR2, 98, 98SE, ME, XP and XP-SP2.

Content originality is of prime importance. Fine-tuning with optimized keywords can be done gradually. When search engines become more "human", your site does not need major surgery.

Google's open-source / software patents dichotomy (contradiction) somehow doesn't rhyme with their mantra of do-no-evil. This author would very much like to be proven wrong on this matter.

Do not fret over rankings. Intel has a PR10, yet when you search for "cpu" or "microprocessor", guess who never appear in the top 10. Doubtless any surfer can find Intel's site even if Intel is given a PR of -2**256 (the decimal value for this number first appeared on the Internet in "A Gentle Introduction to Cryptography").

Consider getting more links as a priority through fair and legal means.

Nothing is more boring than a single item site. Consider adding variety like starting a community project, providing resources for your hobbies or pet issues. Getting visitors with similar interests to visit your site may pay dividends - some may become your customers.

Consider the possibility of exchanging links with your competitors - fair competition without rivalry.

For the record, this author does not own a single share in any of these three companies. The personal observations are written without fear or favor, based on results obtained by using the Open Source Marketing Plan.

Stan Seecrets' Postulate: "How does any ant bring down a giant - by releasing its toxins into a certain part of the giant's anatomy where the sun has hardly shone on." (This is an example of an exploit as defined in the field of cryptography - vulnerability.)