newwebster - 3:34 pm on Aug 9, 2005 (gmt 0)

I see some evidence of what looks like hand edited serps in the niche I follow. For the major 2 keyword phrase in my industry the serps in the top 10 cleaned up a bit a couple days ago. When I use quotes with the keyword phrase it reverts back to the really bad serps that existed without the quotes prior to the cleanup. I really do not think these hard coded serps will stay, but rather these are just a temporary fix for major keyword searches until they fix whatever problem they are having at the present with the algo. Using humans to edit serps creates and unfair bias whereas an algo can not be bias one way or the other.

What really frustrates me is seeing the other countries web results look so much better:
[ca.search.yahoo.com ]
[mx.search.yahoo.com ]
[uk.search.yahoo.com ]

And the other Yahoo supported portals:
[altavista.com ]
[alltheweb.com ]
[overture.com ]

Not perfect by any means, but at least these serps look like some logical algo ranking criteria is being used unlike the U.S. serps.