It's that time of the year again when Google releases it's feel-good Year in Search report intro'd by the usual inspirational message intended to infuse the average person with hope to overcome their insurmountable challenges by sheer force of willpower.

The message IS uplifting. It's also a meaningless platitude.

But that's what we've come to expect from Google. Feel good messages that spin reality in just the right way to make Google seem like the white knight riding to the rescue when in fact that rescue is carefully calculated to pick winners while squeezing the maximum amount of profit from the least amount of effort on Google's part.

To bolster this point we look no further than the past couple of months. Instead of addressing the very real problem of content thieves outranking original content providers we got lame advice from a leading Google spokesman who directed us to contact the thieves and ask them for a link.

Then in November we were told by the VP of Search at Google that expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (E-A-T) is built into "every single query and every single result ... E-A-T applies to everything," he said, "every single query."

If that's true then Google's E-A-T algorithm is failing more times than they care to admit. As one commenter under this totally