Hissingsid - 11:19 am on Dec 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

I say this because the sites I am following which were previously at the top of SERPs are no longer in the first 1000 results for very specific searches containing EVIL KEYWORDS.

Hi Bobby,

Did the pages that were previously there contain evil keywords?

It could be argued that if CIRCA is used then it would look at the broad context of those evil keywords. If they or a token (word=token=word=token why did they change it from word I wonder?) within the search has some more inocent context perhaps that is given "strength" and evil contexts given less strangth.

Non evil example: car tires

If a site uses a high frequency and density of the phrase car tires then it is not as about car tires as one that talks about radial, pirelli, goodyear, tread pattern, car tires, auto tires, tractor tires, wheels etc etc.

Keeping with the CIRCA assumption context is now more important than frequency and density. Plus links to pages on subjects in that broad context and high PR and or backlinks (including context related or exact anchor text) may be important.

The point is that you can describe a process, knowing what we know about CIRCA, that would produce the result that you are seeing without there being a separate filter.

It may be that a weakness has been shown in CIRCA that has never previously been seen. Lets say that previously only a few million documents have been assessed. Now with 3.6 billion to work on anomalies which were never previously seen are being thrown up. The CIRCA database has "over two million unique terms". I would postulate that in order to be processed in the CIRCA technology the search entered has to match one of those 2 million terms exactly. This is why we are seeing what we think are very close terms either processed or not for no apparent logical reason in our eyes. This is also why searching for blue widget +the gives a different result from blue widget and also explains why they were able to fix the -nonsense thing.

I'm hoping that new terms are only added to the Ontology if there is a predetermined level of usage of the term which makes it worth adding. I'm also hoping that "Word Sense Disambiguation" will soon determine that, what is a brand name in the US, is a generic in the UK and realise that 99.99% of the searches are in the generic context not brand related context.

OK so I'm being unrealistic. But then I did go to school in a place called Hope.

Best wishes

Sid