Why oh why did google not just help develop firefox rather than
launching another problem on the world of web development i.e.
chrome? 

This puzzled me for a few hours, then I saw that they were truly
evil when you read the T&C's i.e. they own everything you do via
there browser

If google are going to pontificate to the rest of us then surely it should get its own house in order.

Matt Cutts in this post says "In general, we’ve seen that users usually don’t want to see search results (or copies of websites via proxies) in their search results."

So why then are google returning google maps search results?

The entire industry is talking about what google have done over the last few days, they dropped pagerank for some of the really big names sites. Everybody is surmising that this is as a result of paid links and I tend to agree.

However I don't see this as a bad thing for the SEO community at all and possibly not a bad thing for these sites. I genuinely think that the SEO community should be thanking google for creating even more FUD around SEO.

What am I suggesting?

Simply that you do not count people who were coming to your site anyway  even if they come from Google as part of your Google SEO success.

Why do I say this?

I am often told by people that 80% of there visitors come from google and that they would be out of business if Google dropped them. 

Over at digitalpoint forums there is the single biggest thread I have ever seen on a single topic in SEO, when will the 2007 Q3 pagerank be?  Google are saying nothing and everyone is taking about the possibility that they will not do a pagerank update or that they are going to dump it completely.