Oliver_Henniges - 6:59 am on Oct 8, 2004 (gmt 0)

A very helpful empirical databasis on analyzing the behaviour of that new (modified? beta-?)algo is the w3c mailing lists. I clicked thru some sporadically and found out that the update actually must have taken place soomewhere between sep, 22nd -27th. All posts before 22nd are addressed PR now and all after 27th have not.

I think this is consistent with another thread complaining about a massive drop around sept. 23rd.

Furthermore i found at least one strange example where the toolbar showed PR7 at the complete overview on one thread, dropped to PR4 at September-summary, and moved up tp PR5 showing the single postings. I cannot imagine these lists have inbound-links from anywhere else, so how could this be on the basis of all we so far know about PR?

On a meta-level I begin to doubt whether all this analysis of the algo makes sense at all. We all know that from a mathematical point of view it is impossible to find out about it precisely. The only reason why this pseudo-scientific theory-building, collection of empirical data, veri- and falsification seems to work, is due to the complexity SE-algos have adopted meanwhile.

Perhaps the SE-insiders will become much more cooperative again if we'd move towards a critical analysis of the search results rather than try to find out the best means to spam or move up in ranking (which is basically the same). For instance: As far as my major keywords are concerned, which are not very competitive, I find more and more of these pseudo-directories, dmoz-mirrors and link-farms settling on the first three google pages and I cannot imagine this be very helpful for the user.

The internet has begun to grow faster than moores law, and if this is not already the case it is only a question of time when traditional algos all get their capacity problems. One of the key attempts to cope with this is the discussion on hubs and authorities. We could contribute a lot helping SEs to sort the helpful hubs from the spammers.