BeeDeeDubbleU - 11:10 am on Apr 28, 2005 (gmt 0)

Honestly I don't think that having 'humans' check for the whole spectrum of website 'worthiness' is viable.

What? This has nothing to do with worthiness, it's about spam and the whole spamming process is based on pushing your site to the top of the results. It's an absolute dawdle to find and nuke spammers. If you are a SE they offer themselves to you as a sacrifice.

what rules would you tell them to follow to say what site is better than the other? why?

It would not be their job to say what site is better. That would still be down to the algo. All they would be doing is eliminating spam and offending sites as defined quite clearly and unambiguously by the search engine's rules for inclusion.

Google continues to maintain that their algo can take care of the spam. Well the steadily deteriorating results in most commercial categories would suggest otherwise. If they won't use manual editing then all I am suggesting is that one of the other majors should. I believe that their results would improve beyond recognition quite quickly, making them the SE of choice.

I happen to believe that there is some sort of OOP in place and that it may be affecting some of my perfectly innocent, informational, non-commercial and within Google's guidelines sites. When I see them being penalised in favour of spammer's sites I get upset. Am I not entitled to?