austtr - 11:05 pm on Feb 17, 2003 (gmt 0)

Google is, and will remain, my tool of choice for the forseeable future. By and large I find what I want.... but...

When I am just an ordinary Joe Public searcher, I am starting to get ticked off with being offered sites that have poor relevance (what ever became of word proximity?) and I tend to dust off my arsenal of expletives when I am offered a site with nothing in it.

As a seo person I know there are links in the background that brought about that result.... as a viewer I have no idea why Google thinks I wanted an empty site.

The "links above all else" philosophy has spawned a whole link fabrication cottage industry that is starting to slew some of the results. A poor site with 500 links does not offer the viewer a better outcome than a great site with 5 links.

I now find myself occasionally going to ATW and elsewhere for sanity checks which never used to happen.