rbacal - 3:43 am on Feb 21, 2006 (gmt 0)

when google thinks about 'average users' they aren't thinking about 'you'. They are looking at massive numbers of searches, millions of pages of serps, millions and millions of click throughs. They experiment, it's fairly easy for them to see what the results of an experiment are in real time. So what you may consider average may not correspond to what the actually 'average' searcher wants or reacts positively or negatively to. Sometimes they mix up the serps to reflect what two different groups, both statistically relevant, expect to see.

Just a tangent on this, and that is the "next step in serving up search engine results is going to be that different searchers will see different results, algo determined, and based on a broad set of variables unknown.

So, in effect SEO will be dead as we know it, since a page won't have a "rank" that is consistent. The page may show up first in one set of situations, and 300th for another. In general, that's probably good news for many webmasters, and really bad news for SEO folks and those that have held A consistent rank over time.

I think the result will be "fairer", virtually impossible to game consistently, and if the algos are decent, provide much better search results to individual searchers.