elguiri - 10:08 am on Apr 4, 2005 (gmt 0)

Having spent the weekend re-reading and reflecting, I return to the point someone made earlier (can't find it to reference it - I know it's there somewhere): the processing requirements make these claims near impossible to implement wholly.

The conclusion from reading the original Hilltop document was that you would need a two-step process to rank the pages. Doing that on Google's 8 yards of a document universe would be impossible. This is true not least because G's response time is possibly it's most competitive factor.

That is no less true with these claims. While many relate to static valuations of a document - such as inception or discovery date - and could be built into to a constant in the ranking algo, others are query-dependant (like the age of anchor text, where query terms are included) and would need to be calculated on the hop. Even with massive improvements in processing power, that would be impossible without a decrease in performance.

So if these claims are being implemented to any degree, it's probably over a small subset of "money terms".

That's probably little comfort to many of the people that participate in these pages. Nonetheless, given that many of these claims are either a) conflicting with other search objectives or b) mad, it shouldn't be difficult to extract a short workable list points to be drawn from the patent, such as:

1. watch for linking "spikiness" (what a word!). Build links constantly and steadily. Plan long-term.
2. determine whether your target phrases are better served by stale pages or new pages (how? testing?), then act accordingly.
3. use hosting and nameservers perceived as quality.
4. bookmark your pages
5. hide affiliate links that are perceived as poor quality. Show those perceived as quality. (I imagine we're talking about more than just Amazon)
6. If you use the G toolbar or allow cookies, be aware that you're being watched (we knew that anyway!)