Brett_Tabke - 6:39 am on Feb 3, 2003 (gmt 0)

>In other words, the webserver is programmed to return different content
>to Google than it returns to regular users,

So all the Flash sites have to do to cloak is:
A) Language delivering. Just detect the .coms and connections from .coms as english.
B) Agent delivery. Just give them the text version of the page - which they are.

Do those two things, and you are good-to-go with cloaking. English visitors using Lynx will get the same page and you get to delivery text based content to search engines for indexing. eg: cloaking in the sunshine.

>The "I know cloaked spam when I see it"
>argument doesn't really hold water when it's not blatant.

That's the point, there is so little of this out there now, that isn't even worth arguing about. Taking care of problem results is the search engines cost of doing business. From everything I've seen in the last few years, the problem has all but taken care of itself. We've not had one single story that I know of in the last two years where people were taken away to some inappropriate site after a search. If it has happened, it hasn't lived long in the search engines. That's as it should be.

The closest we've come is with the GW search and the blogs playing with link pop. Neither of those have anything to do with cloaking and point to some logic problems in search engines.

Now the problem is that people are so mental about the whole topic, that innocent people are being classified as doing something wrong.

There was a site that was drug through the forums just last week and pointed out as "gaming" the search engines. They don't even have anyone on staff that understands search engines, let alone to be gaming them. All they were doing was protecting their IP by registering every possible domain and typo surrounding their trademark. They got turned in as 'domain spammers'.

The root of all of these problems is the same today as it was in 1994, the search engine model is fundamentaly flawed. They have based their entire service on the repackaging of other peoples property. Search engines are nothing more than powerful value added resellers.

The most appropriate analogy I have been able to find is that of the stock broker. Stock brokers set inbetween sellers & buyers and do nothing but hook them up and take a fee for doing it. Often they do some sort of value added package such as day trading interfaces, or various stock monitoring services. The same is true of search engines in that they do nothing but set inbetween surfers & sites, and do nothing but hook them up and take something out (often advertising or listing fees) for doing it.