jimbeetle - 5:58 am on Nov 28, 2003 (gmt 0)

I've always kept a real good eye on Ink. My main site receives a hefty amount of Ink traffic from MSN and, even though it's non-PFI, so far this month Ink has grabbed more than 2,300 pages on a 1,500 page site, so it spiders if fairly well and fairly often.

But for now I'm going to wait and see what MSN does when it drops LookSmart results. That hefty amount of traffic I cited above is to secondary sections of the site. Right now the money terms are buried behind 8, 9, and 10 pages of Looksmart results.

So, for me right now it depends on which way MSN jumps: Are they going to replace LookSmart with something else (after all, it did produce some revenue for MSN)? Stay with a few Overture results and then Ink SERPs? Expanded Overture results? Or some model we haven't fathomed as yet?

Then Yahoo. They've been testing Ink here and there but I haven't happend to catch it yet so don't know how the SERPs are presented. Pure Ink? Ink with this? Or Ink with that? Are they going to stay with the current Ink PFI model or modify somehow? Is the Ink algo going to stay basically the same as it's been?

And, how the heck is Yahoo vs MSN going to play out in the first place?

And as for the big G and "once the searchers sense the downgrade of the quality of SERPs," well, as a searcher I've been disatisfied for sometime. G is still, for some reason I don't understand (again, as a searcher), still number one in the hearts and minds of most users. I guess most folks are actually used to not actually finding what they were looking for.

Just too many danged unanswered questions at the moment. One thing is for sure though, it's going to be a very interesting few months in the SE world, have to be prepared to roll with whatever is thrown at us.