Hehe, this is a can of worms.

Personally I don't know what I would do without search engines, it wasn't that long ago that if you wanted to do any kind of research then you had to make a trip to a library & hope they had the relevant books and then hope that had a decent index (or read the whole book) to find what you wanted.

Now we have the luxury of just going to google and doing some searches & in an instant finding what we want. I would say that it is extremely rare that I can't find exactly what I want when doing research (this of course depends on knowing exactly what you want).

If you are not getting the results you want in google then use the advanced search options & be very specific. Google is constantly changing it's algorithms and recently completed a major update called caffeine that it says updates much quicker and is more relevant than the old version. Who knows if that is true but you certainly have more options.

I would also like to make the point that wikipedia is one of the most seo'd sites out there. If you want to know how to setup your website to be loved by the search engines then just take a look at how they do it.

Also, a forum like this is, by its very nature, is heavily seo'd. Google loves large sites with every changing, always updated content i.e. a forum & the software this forum uses will have an seo setup to it.

Seo'ing is just like advertising in the offline world, if you don't advertise then no-one will know your product exists. That is not to say that the world is better or worse for it, it is just business. The difference is that you don't need to have a large amount of money and David can take on Goliath. It has levelled the playing field to a large extent.

I think that at the end of the day, the best sites will always come out on top, think facebook, wikipedia, newspaper sites etc I would also state that running these kinds of heavy content sites takes a huge amount of time, effort and staff i.e. they need to making money in some way. If the content is free then that way is usually via advertising. You tube lost something like 400 million last year, this year I suspect it will make 400 million. The difference is they have implemented advertising, one is sustainable, one is not.

A similar thing has been going on with the music industry for a while of course, there was the whole napster thing etc  The traditional music companies that are doing well are the ones that have shifted their model & embraced the internet (e.g. if it wasn't for youtube, susan boyle would have been a minor celeb in the UK). The ones that are suffering are the monoliths that won't/can't change their business quick enough.

On a personal note, I have to question whether newspapers et al even serve us anymore, they give such a huge distorted image of the world are they doing more harm than good?