mattg3 - 12:27 pm on Feb 14, 2007 (gmt 0)

I am not sure what I should say, my boss is actually starting to wonder why so much money spent on clean websites while all but this is working better. Our most beautiful, relevant, unique, quality sites are in trouble

I'd thing ebay, myspace, youtube et. al. would conclusivly proof that design and clean and quality of content are irrelevant for most users.

Unless you actually want to achieve quality, quality is meaningless ... and indistinguishable for the average populus. Since by definition most people are average, the most popular content will be average to mediocre at best. Popular makes more money than quality unless you have a highly educated audience..

Ergo if you want to reconfigure your squid nice SERPS are relevant. But not if you are some school kid saying hello to his/her mates on myspace.

I think the fallacy in thinking is that most people want quality.. school kid A doesn't give a shoot if they copy their homework from Wikipedia or answer.com ... irrelevant. Ideal for them is an outdated wikifork that doesn't pop up on page one, so the teacher doesn't get where they copied it from.

If Google wanted to achieve quality they would 301 to scholar and sent all employees back to their Stanford dorms...

There are also millions of librarians on this planet that have been cataloging the worlds informations since centuries .. more successfully I would say ..

No they need to make money like the rest of us .. ;)