The New York Times’ David Segal has a fascinating story up on sleazy search optimization done on behalf of JC Penney (who says it doesn’t know anything about it). And Vanessa Fox of Search Engine Land provides some good follow up.
In my own personal searches on Google, I’m still satisfied most of the time–maybe because they rarely involve shopping and other commercial activity–but there’s no doubt that the question of whether Google is fundamentally broken is one of tech’s biggest stories at the moment.