newwebster - 1:45 am on Dec 18, 2003 (gmt 0)

I have a 3 word keyword phrase that I used to be ranked #1 for, of which the last word in the phrase is in present tense: i.e. "ing" at the end. Now I no longer appear anywhere for this phrase, however by just changing the last keyword from present tense to past: i.e. "ed" puts me back at #1. Of course the past tense version does not get serched very much. Is stemming to blame for this? Or, is it that CIRCA can not handle the stemming?

Also, if CIRCA is in play in my industry, then it is not doing very well. I would expect to see more related information regarding the most competive keywords. In this, I mean I would expect to see informative sites that go into making the products and services that would fall under these token keywords. I.e. if the keyword were TV(not my industry), then I would expect to see infomation on how TV's are made, history of the TV, veiwing habbits, Nelson ratings, etc. This is not happining for my industry, all I see is a bunch of sites that are either .edu, .gov, and several .com that only mention the keywords in the title with some text in the body and are only marginally or abstractly on topic. These sites have no real value to the surfer. There are a few sites remaing from pre-Florida that are exact matches which are commercial and I am trying to figure out why they still remain. Additionally, like allot of serches there are the business.com, Amozon.com, etc. directories also listed.

I do think that at this point CIRCA weighting is the most likely explaination. However, it only seems to effect certain keyword combinations and does not seem to be producing what I think Google wanted as the end result for certain competive keword combinations. Either they are going to pull the plug on this, or we are in for a long ride as work on getting it right.