I see that Wired has picked up on Andrew Orlowski's overwrought attempt to create a news story about the effect of the admittedly-incestuous blog network on Google results. I'm not sure how representative ongoing is, but a look at my data doesn't really suggest there's much here to be concerned about.
I occasionally update this page (warning: big) with a summary of the Google searches that led to ongoing—for the moment, right back to the launch in late February. A quick scan suggests that there were a total of just under three thousand visits via Google, which is a vanishingly small proportion of ongoing's traffic.
If you pore through the list of queries, you can find a few cases where people probably were surprised and unfulfilled when arriving at ongoing, but you do have to do some poring, most searches found something quite possibly relevant. This data point, at least, suggests Google's function is reasonably healthy.
For the highlights, cruise through and look at the questions, that is the queries beginning with “how,” “what,”and “why.” There is a feeling, reading these, of the vast ghostly army—one we're all part of, sometimes—looking for the answers they need, to do what they have to do. I hope I helped one or two.
