rfgdxm1 - 4:39 am on Nov 10, 2002 (gmt 0)

>I dont think people generally go to the Web in order to buy on-line. Even not in the US, and as far as I know that is the only country where on-line shopping has become even close to mainstream. They tend to go to find information. If on the side, through search engine PPC ads, banners and text ads on news/mag/guide sites, they buy things, thats great, and thats a good model.

Which is what I keep saying. To keep Joe Surfer happy, Google needs to focus mainly on the quality of non-commercial SERPs.

>Google just cannot reliably rank commercial/shopping/affilate sites. That has become more obvious over the past few months. Too many wannabees chasing after the same high potential keywords, with precious little differentiation or originality.

And, how should merchants shilling widgets be ranked? Cheapest seller highest? Best quality highest? Merchant who sells the most widgets highest?

>Ive argued before that PR and link popularity just does not work with commercial sites or high-competitive searches. The natural "citation frequency" that is so good in finding niche and info sites, is almost useless for finding good commercial sites (for reasons outlined above), so these keywords are spammed out by articifical link popularity, nefarious cloaking, and short term cunning stunts.

Right. If the topic is say amateur radio, the tendency will be for those sites that have the best content on that topic to get the most links. While non-commercial sites don't mind linking to related sites with good content, commercial sites naturally don't want to link to their competition. Thus while a really good non-commercial site can rise to the top on Google because of link popularity, commercial sites have to use trickery to do it.