bobmark - 11:19 pm on Sep 28, 2002 (gmt 0)

This seemed so stupid and crude when it first occurred to me that I immediately dismissed it. Then I read subway?s post with the 3 search terms involving destination and thought about it some more. Here?s the example but mirrors what happened to sites in my category exactly:
Let?s say my site?s title is:?Blue fuzzy widget Packages?
And I used to rank mid top 10 on the search phrase?Blue fuzzy widget?
Now I am nowhere to be found for this search term, but I am still top 10 for?Blue fuzzy? (and almost all the other sites that used to be top 10 are there too except for an exact title match) and number 1 for?Blue fuzzy widget Packages?
So...why am I off the map for the three word phrase and why do searches for that phrase generate? except for the huge top 2-3 sites? generate strange, spammy results NONE of which match on more than 2 of the 3 keywords. It is like the algo applies different rules for 3 word phrases? basically not using all three words or minimizing the importance of 1 - and all the spammy link sites slide in due to their thousands of garbage links.
Is it possible that the?hundreds of Ph.D programmers? Google cultists always invoke as to why the algo is sooooo good used a bazooka to kill the mosquito of?go to hell? and did a hack that affects searches using 3 word keyphrases? Big problems for your site if you had optimized for 3.
Have I gone crazy thinking about this or is it possible?
(I just saw your hidden spam comment subway....wow! are we back to that level of garbage optimization to stay alive? Thanks for bringing back the old days Google!)

[edited by: NFFC at 2:12 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2002]
[edit reason] No specifics please [/edit]