Re:Incompetence or ignorance? (Score 1)

With a quoted phrase '"u tube"', you are correct. With the much more likely unquoted two-word search phrase 'u tube', Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation's utube.com is the second result, behind youtube.com.

Yes, you are right. I'm just too used to searching with quotes, I guess, that I dind't think about not doing it. That doesn't change the fact that their markup is horrendous, though my original point about that being the reason for their absence from Google's index is now proven to be partly incorrect. My research could have been better, I admit.

Didn't suggest that it was. Only that your statement that "Non-semantic code is basically just jibberish for search engines" is about an order of magnitude too strong.

Well, it doesn't make any more sense to a search engine than a PDF document or Flash file without any accessibility voodoo applied to it. It's basically just a huge blob of text, where no parts of the text are weighed or indexed any differently than the other. And that's not very search engine — nor user — friendly.