TheMadScientist - 9:07 pm on Apr 10, 2010 (gmt 0)

These SERPs have many up-to-date changes from 2 minutes ago ... These SERPs are old

I didn't really want a debate either, but I think it's fairly easy to find the preceding confusing, so I wanted to know what the observation actually was. I had no idea you would refer to 'an apparent roll back in ranking methods' as 'old SERPs'... I thought you were referring to an old dataset or something and could not figure out what you meant. Thanks for clarifying the ranking method appears to be a rollback but the data is up-to-date.

I think one of the confusions is people are seeing algo changes and infrastructure changes at the same time, and drawing a distinction is sometimes difficult... I tried to earlier in this thread when there was talk of Caffeine also being an algo change, because we know speed has been a part of the algo for quite a bit of time (mid Jan if I remember correctly) and at the time the dataset used was almost exclusively Big Daddy, so it's fairly reasonable to draw a distinction between an algo change and an infrastructure change, and IMO it's incorrect not to, but I feel the same as you and don't really want to debate the issue either, because I know (basically) the algo is detached from the underlying data storage mechanism, but if others choose to not see it that way, then whatever.

/rant

Thanks for the clarification on what you are seeing.