dataguy - 12:28 pm on Jun 27, 2005 (gmt 0)

they are more like statisticians and speak a different language

The best conversation I had all night was with Paul. At one point I overheard him saying to someone "If you want to get a job working for Google, get a PhD in statistics, not computer science." There's an awful lot that can be read into that...

Google tries to tell which web sites people really like. There are too many web sites out there that simply try to game the system and are not focused on the end user. Google's job is to find the right statistics which separate the sites that end user finds useful from the ones that the end user doesn't find useful.

The less "noise" they have in their stats, the more accurate they can be in determining which sites should be ranked higher, and which sites should be ranked lower. This appears to be Google's goal, more so than simply finding "scraper sites" and de-indexing them or lowering their ranking.

I believe black-hat SEO is the art of trying to fall within that noise. The problem is, as G fine-tunes their methods of gathering their statistics, the noise band becomes narrower and these sites get dropped. Ideally webmaster would forget about the noise band and concentrate on creating the most obviously use sites.