John_Caius - 1:08 pm on Jan 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

Lots of comments in recent threads along the lines of:

"quality of SERPs has dropped"
"need to be an eBay store to get to the top"
"Google has lost its 'cool' tag"
"increase in visitors from MSN, AV etc."

Google thinks its SERPs have improved but are there really many areas that have genuinely benefited from less spam in the last three months?

If not, should Google just assign recent changes to the dustbin of history and reload the pre-Florida algorithm, then go from there?

It strikes me that, if those quotes really do represent the true state of affairs, perhaps spam in certain areas where people usually expect spam might be better for the Google image than poor results across the board, especially in areas where 'normal' web users are starting to notice, such as looking for information.

A thread for objective analysis of SERPs you follow as a user, not SERPs you follow as a website owner... :)