DaveAtIFG - 6:58 pm on Dec 13, 2003 (gmt 0)

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

Or as it has been so eloquently stated on numerous occasions, "Google is broke!" :)

The "Google dance" has been a fact of life for so many years that we all just expect it to occur with predictable regularity, and we anticipate a certain duration for the dance before the band quits, the lights go out, and we all go home.

I'm suspecting Florida, or Florida/Galen is more properly F - L - O - R - I - D - A. It's still a work IN PROGRESS, and that our old mindset about what a Google update looks like is flawed.

In retrospect, it's clear to me that Dominic/Esmeralda (Domerlda?) was about AdSense. From the AdSense FAQ, "We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages." That sure sounds like "semantics" to me. Domerelda was not a "traditional dance." I'm convinced it was all one big update done primarily to facilitate AdSense and semantics.

Based on SERPs I regularly follow as well as miscellaneous searches, and viewing Domerelda as one lengthy update, I conclude Florida (or Flalen ;) ) is still in progress. Further, I think Google is incorporating semantic search as used in AdSense, into the entire database. It took a while for Domerelda to conclude, so I expect Flalen to take a while too.

<added>Moved some pesky commas!</added>

[edited by: DaveAtIFG at 7:12 pm (utc) on Dec. 13, 2003]