ciml - 11:55 am on Jun 16, 2005 (gmt 0)

I agree that being big, easy and fast were all important, but I think better search results played a major part.

Just as manipulation of PageRank became a problem for Google, proximity weakened as an indicator of good, relevant content with the proliferation of "made for search engine" pages. I didn't mention the heavy weighting on anchor text (the other area I feel was important to Google being better at the time), but anchor text bombing has been a problem too.

It must be quite hard for any search engine to balance relevance with made for search engine pages, but I detect a gradual trend towards complaints that Google too often favours an irrelevant page on a favoured domain to a more relevant page on a less favoured domain. Phrase searching helps overcome this but I must wonder if Google would do better to put some weight back on proximity.