rfgdxm1 - 2:22 am on Mar 19, 2004 (gmt 0)

>It has been suggested that improvement could be measured by the time spent on a site. This is sent to google throught the google toolbar.
If a search has position 1 - average time spent = 15 seconds , position 2 average time spent = 20 seconds. Then an assumption can be made that position 2 was more relevant than position 1.

And, what percent of Google users have the toolbar installed, and also have enabled the PR display? Some problems with that sample are:

#1) There is good reason to suspect that those people who have the toolbar installed, and also have enabled the PR display, are a very unrepresentative sample of the total population of Google users. Skewed toward webmasters, SEOs, computer geeks, etc. How many Grandmothers are checking PR of pages with the toolbar?

#2) The toolbar is only available for IE on Windows. What about Netscape, Opera, and Mozilla users? Or Mac or Linux users?

#3) At this moment I have no less than 7 instances of IE open on this box. Is that small page about the Cuban Missile Crisis I have had open for the last 3 hours, and ignored since then because I was using other IE instances, really *that* important? Those who use multiple open instances of IE will confound your way of measuring.

#4) Let's say I spent 5 minutes on the first Cuban Missile Crisis page I looked at, and not finding what I wanted clicked the back button on my browser, went to another page and spent just 15 seconds there because I immediately found what I was looking for. Your way of measuring is rewarding bad content, and not good content.

I could go on...