Great post by Dan Grossman today about Google's actions in penalizing sites who happen to sell a few text links on the side. I don't have too much to add to Dan's thoughts; it's a conundrum from a technical standpoint that Google can't tackle this without a penalty, and it's a conundrum from a policy standpoint that completely irrelevant AdSense ads on my page are okay but topical, more relevant links that happen to be paid ads are uncool.
Perhaps it's indicative of Google's search capabilities lately. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy Google and their work, but I've been a bit less than thrilled about their search progress lately. Ask.com in particular has been burning the midnight oil to try to differentiate themselves and improve, but Google has remained the same for ages. The stripped down, straightforward aspect of Google is their trademark (for good reason), but I've been running into more and more less-than-helpful results in Google lately. Just some idle thoughts for today.