keeper - 11:18 pm on Feb 4, 2003 (gmt 0)

This has been an awesome thread! Permit me to chime in with my opinion :)

Personally Danny's description resonates with me the most.

Alan, trying to divorce the word "cloaking" from the actual technology is going to confuse a lot of people. Indeed, your assertion that cloaking = intent to decieve a search engine, but bait and switch is ok, is really confusing me.

If I serve a text only page to text only browsers, lets say to "to customise the user experience" (something that was previously mentioned, and you outline as #3 in your "ok list" above: "Delivering different content to different browsers: Not cloaking ")
(note: for argument sakes it is exactly the same text only formatted differently)
I am not cloaking because my intent is to customise the user experience.
But, a large bi-product of my activity is fantastic search engine rankings, because my text pages have keywords in the title, description and heading tags.

On the other hand, I could perform the exact same technical set up of my content, but my intent is to gain search engine rankings, and the bi-product is a customised user experience.

How then does Googlebot (an automated program) know whether i am wearing a halo or horns?

Your position not only muddles my perception of what cloaking is - a technology, but it is also rendered pratically useless in real world applications.

The only way to determine intent is hand editing by search engine staff, and in the example i described, it would be difficult to determine, even if they did have the resources to carry it out... who really knows my intent but me anyway. And, if you carry out the cloaking correctly, you are not decreasing the value of Google or any other engine as an Internet navigation tool (in fact in most cases you actually increase it by providing content that a spider can "read") your client can be happy that they recieve increased traffic and the surfer is happy to have found what they are looking for.

All without having to know my intent.