steveb - 1:18 am on Aug 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

"How are the Se's going to hand sort this again?"

Um like they are. No need to be blind about this. They have millions of searches but that is irrelevant to the discussion. Hand ranking is plainly easy to do if you are an engine if you restrict it to virtually any criteria. For example: what are the fifty most common one word searches? It's absurd to assert this wouldn't take minimal humanpower to manually check and sort, even with a few levels of backup (three levels of hand sorting or whatever; supervisors checking regular sorters).

Then, once you do this, you even have a seed pool of results. Links to and from the hand sorted results would get a higher authority value than normal ones within the niche, or even within search terms involving the one word.

It's an excellent practice that becomes more inevitable everytime one of the algos craps all over itself.

Also, just because the hand sorted results don't get updated doesn't mean they can't. That's just silly. It would be a trivial amount of work to keep the 50 or 100 most popular search terms hand sorted. These are companies making hundredsof millions of dollars. They can hire a handful of people and not die.