I have to disagree. There are circumstances where writing a tech book is the right thing to do. Not for the money, necessarily. It's a great experience to undergo admittedly is is kinda fun seeing your name on dead trees in a bookstore. I've written a couple of tech books, mostly on Perl programming back in the early 2000's. Scott Meyers was one of my editors. It took nights and a few weekends over a summer to do the first edition but it's still paying off. I get a royalty check for between $80-160 every month since 2002 -- it doesn't pay the rent, but it's a nice dinner out. The books are also great during interviews as proof that I can express myself well, can work with deadlines, and am willing to take a chance.

(continued... damned mouse touchpad error) ...Not only has SO been squeezed out of the rankings, but I found Christmas shopping online to be much worse this year than last because what I wanted was buried under crap search results. Maybe they've stopped trying or caring about search. Secondly, Google is the 800lb Gorilla of the Internet. If they wanted, they could simply crush anything that opposed them. I've been dying for a "never show me results from this site again" button in Google's search results. One click and the offensive scrapers go away. Bing, on the other hand, seems active in tweaking and refining results...

As I understood you're talking about scrapers, that try to cheat google algorithms (if the algos change, the cheating will eventually evolve) but you're blaming google, and not the scrapers?? Google has always been about organizing oceans of chaos into something manageable and searchable. Lately they've failed in two respects. First, their searches are finding more noise and less signal. Google is supposed to be chock full of the best minds on the Internet and their algorithms are being beaten soundly. Not only has SO been s