A human should sort out obviously wrong and negative results and (useless) pages which reached good positions using unwanted methods only and that should be audited, because without it, many pages would become victims of personal preferences. (see DMOZ, where this takes place!).

I wonder sometimes, why endless advertisement pages, catalogues and contentless fakepages and worse pages with faked content but in rality bad content cover the best places, and not only for a short ime, over months and longer… nobody seems to check this…

More: scriptresults like “buy North pole at Ebay” , when someone searches for North pole, are numerous… stupid results… will humans do something against this? Or is the financial Adwords-aspect finally the benchmark of correction…? If the bad page makes a lot of clicks, no matter, what´s real content? Sometimes, it seems not only to me so…

July 10, 2007 @ 11:26 am

I’ll probably get hammered for this thought – but why is it so important for Google to spend those resources turning complex algorithms into simple algorithms? Does an increase in simplicity = and increase in efficiency or what?

Actually, this is a very good question, and there are lots of reasons simplicity is preferable. One person already pointed out that it’s easier to code.

The other reason is that Google is basically trying to develop systems based on estimates of what is probable. So, they are essentially doing probability and statistics but based on massive amounts of noisy data.

When ever you try to develop a probabalistic model of some sort, there is a strong likelihood that some features in your model are data artifacts that come from imputing meaning to noise.

If you find a simple 1 parameter model that fits the data as well or better than a 2 parameter model, it is generally the case that the second parameter gave no additional data. Simpler models are often more robust.

My way to personalize would some optional buttons:

While searching my Stats-files
after the behaviour of a special crawler-bot (and his targets)
I thought about the best way to find him and his brothers one way. So I came to a further idea for the Searchulator’s button-tide.

This * button could be the joker in my search queries.

Greetings Karl

For instance, one of the thing I most hate, is to enter http://www.google.com and getting the results from http://www.google.at although the page still seems to be google.com.

When I enter a term on http://www.google.fr, I still want to have the pages in France and the page from French and again it is only possible through deleting the cookies.

Personalization may be good but in my personal case, it is making my researches harder so I am better off without it.

Nope. It was not a stupid question! I am still finding plenty of pockets of things I don’t understand in this. The pages in question have NO alt tags!

I will clean those pages up and add those and see what happens. Thank you so much!
dk

And to others, don’t feed the trolls. The only way to kill them is to ignore their comments altogether.

I get a ton of links because we run a news site that is tops in the industry, so the site climbs, then drops… The cycle continues every couple of weeks.

again maybe am asking a stupid question, but does your site drop because a large number of other sites are reporting/talking about the same issues? If these sites take longer to publish these articles / stories, they would probably force you from the top positions if they are stronger.

A human editor is highly unlikely to target one site – there are various of other SEO factors, but without seeing the present state of your site, it would be hard to advise…

How do you know whether that person wants to know about how blue widgets work or where s/he can buy blue widgets.. indeed, the searcher might even be looking for a site about their local footy team ‘the blue widgets’… it is so hard to measure intent.

Valid comment, but shouldnt there also be an onus on educating searchers on refining results?

One thing that words great are the annotated results: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=gallbladder+surgery&meta= (refining results and advice on top of SERPs)
and related searches: http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=british+holidays&meta= (below the SERPs).

These sort of touches enble the use of long tailed aproach to reaching the right target and a great step in the right direction… (solely IMO)

@Dr. David Klein

On the other hand, we created a couple of cartoon books that are about 80 pages long each, and have very little content on each page, and cartoons. They are some of the best pages of content in our industry. Users love them, and they do have quite a few links.

Please fogive me if this is a stupid question (i havent seen the pages in question), but do you make use of relevant alt tags on the comics? Maybe descriptions of the story they portray may help increase text content. These should help with SERPs, and failing that, would atleast add a factor of usability for those using screenreaders, and maybe show up results on related image searches.

The only thing that kinda scares me about it though; at some point, popular sway could begin to have too much influence over search results. And then we’d end up with sites that are popular getting the high positions, regardless of whether they contained the most relevant (or accurate) information.