To see the range of emotion that Google can inspire -- everything from fear, anxiety, irritation and anger to, more rarely, unbridled exuberance -- the best place to check in is the Google News section of WebmasterWorld, an online forum where webmasters and search engine optimizers congregate to discuss the search site. No change that Google makes goes unnoticed here because, says Sullivan, "if you look at the number of hours people spend searching Google, it means that if anything changes at Google, Web site owners may feel it more dramatically than they have felt it in the past." So, as Chris Sherman, who edits a newsletter on search engines called SearchDay, says, webmasters spend their lives "watching every twitch that Google makes."

The webmasters become especially agitated every 30 days or so, when Google updates its index to reflect the new data it has collected from around the Web. Since an update can change a particular site's ranking on a particular set of keywords, each month portends a dramatic shift in fortunes for any Web owner. In the wake of a new index, some people find themselves up, and some people find themselves down, and the forums on Webmaster World come alive with complaints, questions, suggestions and compliments to Google.

It's a fascinating interplay: The webmasters kick and scream, and GoogleGuy, the company's online ambassador to the webmaster world, tries to calm their fears and answer as many questions about the changes as he can, while remaining, out of necessity, somewhat coy about Google's ranking scheme. Some of the webmasters hate this -- they consider Google secretive and capricious and they wonder why it has so much influence on the Web. They cook up conspiracy theories: Is Google trying to put search engine optimizers out of business? Is Google changing search-result rankings to force businesses to buy ads on its site instead? Or is Google perhaps just broken?

Experienced webmasters and search optimizers have a more nuanced outlook -- they consider Google's shifts a challenge, a puzzle that they've dedicated themselves to figuring out. "It is frustrating," says Justin Sanger, the president of Pulsity, a Chicago company that helps Web sites rank high in Google and other search engines. "Not only is it impossible to ascertain the exact nature of the rules, but it's also a moving target. Google's always changing, so it's a continual cat-and-mouse game. But it is our job as independent professionals to understand it. The onus is on us to identify how Google, in providing its free search services, ranks our sites." Others have a more a Zen-like approach to doing well in Google. "You can't control Google," says a search engine marketer who goes by the name martinibuster on Webmaster World. "Anything you do to control Google, the more you try to manipulate it, the more it will backfire on you. It's counterintuitive, but it's when you let go -- when you don't try to control Google -- then your results get better."

In its May update, Google switched from an index it called Cassandra to one named Dominic. (Google gives each successive index a name in alphabetical order, in much the same way that meteorologists name hurricanes.) Google seems to use every update as an opportunity to fine-tune its ranking algorithm, and Dominic, apparently, contained major changes. On Webmaster World, more than a couple thousand people wrote in about Dominic, many of them saying that something must be very wrong at Google -- the results it was spitting out seemed bizarre.

It's not clear whether Dominic represented an actual algorithmic departure for Google or if it was a minor tweak blown out of proportion by webmasters. Most people on the Web probably didn't notice a difference. But one person who did see a change in Google in May was Jeremy Zawodny, a Silicon Valley engineer, whose blog had been, for a while, the page Google returned first when someone asked it about "Jeremy." Then Zawodny noticed that "Jeremy" returned, instead, the site for the comic strip "Jeremy" at the No. 1 ranking, and that his blog had dropped below No. 10. Zawodny's old-school home page was in fact ranked higher than his blog, which he found very odd. His blog, which he updated all the time and which was much more popular online, should have been on top. (Zawodny works at Yahoo, but he cautions that his opinions and observations of Google are strictly his own.)

So Zawodny blogged about his Google demotion. Why, he wondered in a May 24 post, was Google suddenly being so mean to blogs? Was this evidence that the search engine was trying to weed them out from its rankings? Zawodny speculated that he was seeing the first signs of a bad trend. "Google is no longer concerned solely with what's popular," he wrote. "Like most companies, they also care a lot about what sells or what advertisers want. Many speculate that Google is responding to various pressures to keep blogs from tainting their results. Perhaps."

Zawodny's post came at a time of high tension in blogland. In recent months, many pundits have complained that Google's results were getting clogged with blogs. In March, Andrew Orlowski, a writer for the Register, an online tech daily, pointed out a phenomenon he called "Googlewashing" -- a practice in which bloggers, working together, can essentially redefine some important cultural or political concept in Google. The idea was not exactly new. Since Google relies heavily on "link analysis," and since bloggers are the Web's most indefatigable linkers, the search engine has always given them great weight -- and bloggers found out last year that if a whole lot of them started linking to the same thing at more or less the same time, they could affect Google's results.

Orlowski fretted about this small group's power over Google. "Orwell would be amused, indeed," he wrote. In the New York Times in May, the linguist and NPR commentator Geoffrey Nunberg picked up on Orlowski's thread, writing that Google's rankings often "mirror the interests of the groups that aggregate around particular topics: the bloggers, experts, hobbyists and, often, the crackpots":

"Not long ago a German friend of mine went to Google for help in refuting a colleague who maintained that American authorities engineered the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, citing as evidence, among other things, the delay in sending American fighter jets aloft that morning," Nunberg wrote. "My friend did searches on a number of obvious strings, like '9/11 scramble jets intercept.' But almost all the pages that came up were the work of conspiracy theorists, with titles like 'Guilty for 9-11: Bush, Rumsfeld, Myers' and 'Pentagon Surveillance Videos -- Where Are the Missing Frames?'"

Around the same time, Orlowski reported an apparent scoop: Google had recognized that blogs were hurting the search engine and it wanted to fix the "blog noise problem" by putting all weblog content into a separate tab in the search results, just as it does with newsgroup content. Orlowski acknowledged, in his article, that this idea was more theory than fact, and Google has since denied the notion repeatedly. But the thought that Google was up to something nefarious seemed to stick, and it was amplified in the echo chamber of blogland.

So when Jeremy Zawodny saw that his blog was no longer high up in Google, he figured that Google had finally caved in -- that it had altered its ranking algorithm to appease the critics who said that bloggers had too much sway. "I think Google just kind of thought, Maybe these bloggers are getting too powerful," he says. On his blog, he wrote, "I'd like to talk a moment to mourn the passing of PageRank, the secret sauce that made Google the spicy search engine we once knew and loved." It was the end of an era, he suggested; Google had lost its innocence, its algorithmic blindness, and it now seemed to be choosing its own favorites. Zawodny's post was cited by many bloggers as a sign that Google had lost its way.

On June 15, Google began updating its servers to a new index called Esmerelda. And in this index, a query for "Jeremy" will return Zawodny's blog as the first result -- just as it did before the Dominic update. What happened? Did Google decide that it did not, after all, want to demote blogs? Had the company determined that the heat from bloggers -- who, remember, are also now one of the company's key constituents -- was too great? Or was the Dominic update just an aberration -- had the company never meant to do anything to blogs, and was the whole thing some kind of computational misunderstanding?

For good reason, Google doesn't talk about its ranking algorithms; if folks knew what Google was doing, the search engine would be easy to trick. But in the absence of information from the company, rumors, theories and groundless speculation run free. On the Web, Google has taken on the aura of a god -- enigmatic, arbitrary, worthy of our fear and our love. Everyone's watching it for signs of anger and of embrace; we know that whatever it does will affect us profoundly, and so people watch it, and they worry.

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