superscript - 10:20 pm on Dec 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

For the past four or five weeks, some of the greatest (and leastest) Internet minds (I include myself in the latter) have been trying to figure out what has been going on with Google.

We have collectively lurched between one conspiracy theory and another - got ourseleves in to a few disagreements - but essentially found ourselves nowhere!

Theories have involved Adwords (does anyone remember the 'dictionary' concept - now past history.)

And Froogle...

A commercial filter, an OOP filter, a problem caused by mistaken duplicate content, theories based on the contents of the Directory (which is a mess), doorway pages (my fault mainly!) etc. etc.

Leading to the absurd concept that you might be forced to de-optimise, in order to optimise.

Which is a form of optimisation in itself.

But early on, someone posted a reference to Occam and his razor.

Perhaps - and this might sound too simple! - Google is experiencing difficulties.

Consider this, if Google is experiencing technical difficulties regarding the sheer number of pages to be indexed, then the affected pages will be the ones with many SERPs to sort. And the pages with many SERPs to sort are likely to be commercial ones - because there is so much competition.

So the proposal is this:

There is no commercial filter, there is no Adwords filter -Google is experiencing technical difficulties in a new algo due to the sheer number of pages to be considered in certain areas. On page factors havbe suffered, and the result is Florida.

You are all welcome to shoot me down in flames - but at least it is a simple solution.