I agree with you somewhat, but out of those 256,000 results in reality people will only browse the first 10 or so pages searching, so seo does play a very big role in standing out among the competition. Generally people assume if you're at the top of a search engine it must mean it's because you're good. I agree with the design theory though, out of all the hosting sites i've come across the ones that really stick in my mind is www.hostrocket.com, www.lunarpages.com, www.websitesource.com, is it any coincidence that they're all designed by ceonex? I think not