The worst game on the Internet has nothing to do with gambling or video. It is the game website owners play in trying to guess how the major search engine companies calculate their rankings - what factors reward a page and what factors penalize it in displaying the results of a search. It is this process that makes a page more prominent or hard to find.

Over the years, I have attended presentations at which knowledgeable practitioners relate what observers think are the rules based on how the search vendors behave and the hints they drop. This is a crazy way of doing business. Could you imagine filling out a tax return and not knowing until it has been filed whether it complied with the law or not? This is the system that is operating in web search and I cannot see what harm would come in having the rules known.( Actually, it is like playing a video game because the player does not know what works until playing the game many times.)

That would provide a level playing field. And if the rules shift, they would still be known, and it would eliminate what I consider to be an unnecessary industry - the SEO consultants. We know what the rules are in every other media that I am aware of; why not make the web more transparent?