jrobbio - 12:25 pm on May 20, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>c) Unfair penalties. Anyone getting a human response on these? I bought a new domain in January. Worked for ages on it, and... PR0. Why? Someone had previously owned it in Sept 2001 and got a penalty. Emails explaining and begging for common sense over a month ago ignored. I'm not the only one. <<

This never occurred to me before you mentioned it. How did you find out (apart from the PR0)? I must say procedure rather than common sense reigns on this one.

As for "the wobble" I have no thorough conception of how complex the spam filters are, but I'm guessing that it requires a serious amount of experimentation on mass widespread data. Maybe there were errors in the Cassandra update, think about DMOZ screwing up since September, but people have still stuck with it.

Another thing I think Google are trying to cover is the approach LookSmart have had with Grub and they may be trying to counter that with the increased activity of freshie, which might be messing up the way Google originally worked.

Another thing is the idea of having changing SERPS rather than static front pages, which I got the indication of from the differences in a lot of the datacentres. Fresh data seems to be a lot more prominent in some datacentres than others although I think this is a dangerous idea since some people want reliable consistent results.

Rob