Search Engines and SEO

Been thinking about how Google (and other search engines) function and the importance they place on links and anchor tags. Does this strategy really provide more relevant content to me? It did initially, but now with so many SEO professionals out there the relevancy of search results seems to be going to those companies that know how to manipulate the results the best.

To illustrate how results can be manipulated - do a search for "miserable failure" on Google. You will see that the first result here is George W. Bush's biorgaphy. This has been accompllished through a technique known as Google bombing - a high number of sites place links to Bush's bio using the words "miserable failure" as the link - this creates a high page ranking for Bush's bio when the term "miserable failure" is searched for.

If you think back to search engines in the mid/late 90s you can probably remember them not being that useful. As more and more people understood how to manipulate the results, the search engines themselves became less and less effective of finding anything useful (because marketers had taken over).

Could SEO and organic search marketing be the downfall of today's search engine? Probably not, seeing as the resources Google has to improve it's technology, but an interesting thought none the less.