flicker - 3:34 pm on Dec 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

Hissingsid, I like your latest idea. It *does* match what I've seen in the educational searches. Many are interpreting our satisfaction with these searches to mean that non-commercial/informational searches weren't affected, but that's not true. The searches were affected--sites that are actually about a topic are coming up ahead of irrelevant spam sites with the search phrase listed 20 times on it and sites about a business that merely has the search phrase as part of its company name. People who are searching for "trilobite" may want to learn about trilobites, see a fossil hunter's trilobite collection, or buy trilobites online, but it's unlikely they're interested in Trilobite Ted's used cars, much less a porn page with "trilobite trilobite trilobite" pasted all over it. (This is a completely hypothetical example, as should probably be obvious. :-D But I've seen exactly these scenarios with real keywords.)

If the algorithm is deciding what the real content of each page is from semantic analysis, it is doing a good job with educational searches but missing the mark on some commercial pages--possibly due to heavy use of outdated optimization techniques making the desired keyphrase look like a company name or inorganic spam to the parser. To me this is the most sensible explanation suggested yet.