Since Privacy International singled out Google for being involved in "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy", Matt Cutts's blog has been receiving lots of traffic.

Cutts is Google's expert on web spam - the method by which people play the system to move up through the Google search results.

Last weekend, after Privacy International published its draft report on the privacy policies of internet companies, Cutts posted "Why I disagree with Privacy International" and promptly became the top story on popular news aggregator Techmeme, as well as racking up more than 100 comments.

For the record, Cutts believes Privacy International got it badly wrong and that Google "as a company takes privacy very seriously". In particular he finds it surprising that his employers ranked so poorly in the same year that AOL released millions of raw queries from hundreds of thousands of users and Google was the only company to contest a department of justice request for large amounts of search data.

Although recent events have focused attention on Cutts's musings on Google and search generally, his blog has a loyal readership and Cutts also uses the blog for his thoughts on non-Google related topics.

A recent post requesting suggestions as to where he should spend his holidays attracted an impressive 224 comments.

Cutts may be essential reading for web masters and search engine marketers (he has more than 27,000 subscribers) but even those with a casual interest in the internet giant will benefit from bookmarking this insider's view.

Matt Cutts:Gadgets, Google, and SEO http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/