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We had an interesting meeting with a local businessman yesterday. The meeting itself went pretty much as planned but what made it so interesting was that it gave us a chance to look at the Web and how search engines work through the eyes of someone who has a limited understanding of how things work online.

After the meeting and through last night and into this morning I kept going over what his view of the online world had shown us and I began to realise that the industry we work in is something way beyond anything that even the Mad Hatter could have envisaged.

Those of us who have worked online for years almost certainly see nothing unusual about how things work here. Things look very normal to us ... we might occasionally grumble about some things but we accept the status quo and work with it.

From the outside though the online industry seems to be totally insane. The guy we talked to wanted us to do some SEO work for him but couldn't understand why we are just not prepared to offer any guarantees.

In the real world if he employs someone to do something for him he sees the result and there are always guarantees if problems arise but here we were offering to do some expensive work for him and we wouldn't offer any guarantees.

And just to make matters worse, on the way into town he passed one of our competitor's billboards where they were guaranteeing first page placement. Of course there was fine print ... like it was really Adwords that they were offering ... but that wasn't mentioned on the billboard.

Right there ... with Adwords ... is a crazy aspect of this business. Google says it's an auction - the more you're prepared to pay the higher up your ad appears. But then some people can pay less than their competitors and still get a higher ranking.

That makes perfect sense to us but try explaining it to someone who is too busy running their business to have ever read anything about paid online advertising.

Then there are the guidelines that Google has for websites. To someone outside the industry it's obvious ... comply 100 per cent with those rules and their websites will rank well. But then those of us inside the industry know that Google doesn't follow its own guidelines ... it can, and does, change its guidelines at any time and getting inbound links the way Google wants is impossible for small businesses.

We know it's like that and we don't seem to think that there is anything strange about it. Have we somehow detached ourselves from reality?

But that's all over in mainstream ... here in adult we're not like that at all ... but of course we are just the same.

Over here in adult we're prepared to comply with all sorts of rules that the link lists and TGPs have for anyone who wants to get listed and get some traffic from them. Here we have to limit the amount of advertising we have on a page while they can stuff advertising into every spare nook and cranny they can find.

They expect us to give freeloaders thumbnails and images that are of the best possible quality ... we have to be prepared to give up prime advertising spots for links to those link lists and TGPs ... and with many TGPs we have to be prepared to let them skim traffic that was heading our way and send it anywhere that suits them.

But then we can't point the finger at other people because we make life hard for ourselves too. We're prepared to give away everything ... even the money shot ... for free. We give the surfer everything he needs and wants and then expect him to sign up with our sponsor.

Why would a surfer want to spend money when we just gave it to him for free?

And along the way we've burnt so many people with hidden cross-sells, paysites that don't deliver on their promises, malware and trojans that it's a wonder anyone out there ever buys any porn site memberships.

Hey it all seemed ... and seems ... perfectly logical to people in this industry but to an outsider what we do and have done is a perfect recipe for disaster. But we still go on doing it.

It all seems to make perfect business sense to those of us who work online but sometimes ... if we talk to normal people ... we get a glimpse of the utter craziness that is our world and for a little while at least even some of us are left scratching our heads and wondering what on earth we're doing.