When Google arrived, it was a huge advance in search. It offered an obvious improvement in relevancy, which is why so many serious searchers switched to it from AltaVista and then users of other search engines moved over.
Nothing I wrote suggested that Google was bad, didn't offer great relevancy or anything like that.
My story is about what happened when Google revealed PageRank scores for pages across the web. That fueled an explosion in link buying and selling. It allowed people to attach Google's own score to a page, a value if you will that Google itself placed on those pages, which made it easier to then assign a monetary value.
In turn, that lead to many of the woes that the web as a whole has to deal with today: understanding how to use nofollow to block links, to stay in Google's good graces. Spam mail pitching links, trying to buy links. Link spam
I'm sure we'd have had some of this even without PageRank scores ever having been revealed. Perhaps it would have been as much, even. After all, it was well-known that Google was leveraging links as part of its ranking algorithm. The market would have been there.
But I do think that releasing the PageRank scores accelerated market faster than it would have done otherwise.
Back to the gaming -- again, it feels like you're reading stuff I didn't actually write. I'm certainly not saying that Google itself introduced the ability for people to try and game search engines. That was happening even before Google existed. Of course, Google initially thought it was immune. In 1998, Sergey Brin even said this on a panel that I moderated:
"Google’s slightly different in that we never ban anybody, and we don’t really believe in spam in the sense that there’s no mechanism for removing people from our index. The fundamental concept we use is, you know, is this page relevant to the search? And, you know, some pages which, you know, they may almost never appear on the search results page because they’re just not that relevant."
Google soon changed its view and introduced extensive spam fighting efforts. Those were inevitable. As you say, it was prey that would attract predators. And even with the link selling, it has done an admirable job fighting off the spam. It's not always perfect, but it's a very robust system.
Nevertheless, the spam attempts will continue regardless if Google actually blunts them because, as the article explained, there's simply so many people with misconceptions that they'll chase anything anyway. PageRank scores fed into this, that's all.