Marcia - 3:43 am on Sep 25, 2004 (gmt 0)

Hey Phil, LTNS!

As far as I know, there's no evidence that TSPR is being used. Apart from that, TSPR is about topics and not about relevancy. They are quite different.

Relevancy isn't evidenced - there can be a page that's just scraped junk or that reads like it's been run through a jargon generator, but has the proper ingredients in place and it can rank.

It sure doesn't look like TSPR is being used, especially looking at the weight anchor text still carries and checking backlinks on some sites. But the sequencing of papers and patents out there lends suspicion that they've got something on that order in their minds. And then there's stemming and semantics. Those are too prominent in conversation to ignore. Besides, what we see today isn't necessarily what we'll see tomorrow.

Somehow all roads seem to lead back to Jon Kleinberg, including the patent issued this year

[webmasterworld.com...]

That's what got me very nervous (as well as fascinated), especially with some sites disappearing into oblivion during and soon after the Florida debacle. Even whole categories of sites getting hit - there were lengthy discussions on a couple of specifics that were locality oriented. I personally saw one site come back only after relevant outbound and inbound linking was added (locality related, BTW), and two that have not and don't seem like they will. Not that they don't have links and PR - but they do not have any inbound topically related links. Just anecdotal observations, but it leads me to think that we may have to start thinking further than we have in the past.

Not that PR isn't PR, just a number, and that anchor text isn't anchor text, but that at some time an added component of on-topic links may needed. The time may come that it's a necessity to have the *right* links on top of that.

Incidentally, this is a good OLD discussion, back when the landscape was totally different:

[webmasterworld.com...]

What's interesting is Yahoo acquiring all those other search companies. Looking up a hobby site of mine at Yahoo that's on my ISP space, with all the many, many "sites" on the same physical ISP's domain, clicking on "other sites from this domain" at Yahoo brings up only those that are on the same topic as mine, either by theme or by including the keywords on their pages.

Especially with the coming emphasis on local search, I suspect they're all headed toward refining relevancy and/or topical standards. I would like to hear a good, thorough explanation of the difference between the two - topic and relevancy; it's a very thought-provoking concept.

You could say that each link's relevancy could be ascertained when parsing each page, but relevant to what? There are many topics that most pages are relevant to, and not just the page's main topic. So each link would need to be identified as being relevant to multiple topics, and that information would need to be stored. I could go into much greater detail, and provide more reasons, about why it isn't feasible to ascertain relevany at parse time, but I'll leave it by saying that it's just toooooooo big a thing for the engines to do.

How about another step thrown in somewhere, maybe based on linkage, that is done at other than query time? Isn't that even a remote possibility?