I'm not sure if this is a new result, but in one of the "Florida" threads, someone mentioned the key phrase "miserable failure" as being indicative of Google being broken after the update. I had to check it out myself, and lo and behold, #1 is the current president's bio, where neither word are mentioned and no visible backlinks use the text. However, upon examining the other results, I noticed Bush's name and the words "miserable failure" in very close proximity on several, if not ALL results for at least 5 pages.
There are theories about anchor text being depreciated, but is it more that Google is starting to experiment in context-sensitive word association? Where, in the broader terms at least, it tries to determine the user's intent based on association on indexed sites, then skews the result to be most relevant to the term WHETHER THAT TERM IS ON THE PAGE OR NOT?
Basically, that the site doesn't say it but enough sites have the two close together so Google, in an effort to determine what I'm talking about, says "hey! GWB and Miserable Failure are together a WHOLE LOT and here's a great site about GWB!"
I might be way off, and I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of explaining what I'm thinking. However, if Google DID try to do something like this, it very well WOULD toss the status quo of results into complete chaos and make "remote seo" via links extremely difficult at best. You'd get relevance because the page linking to you was relevant in more ways than just the text of the link...any takers?
