rfgdxm1 - 3:28 am on Mar 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Running ATW searches Jeremy, I definitely see an algo at work. I've never had trouble optimizing for FAST. I think what you are reacting to is that people are finding ATW too easy to beat. From the way I have their algo figured, it is very vulnerable to spammers. My guess is why things seem so random to you is because serious spammers are doing it for money. Since ATW is such a minor player, the spammers are doing what they do aimed at Google. What spammer wants to nail ATW, while they are buried in the SERPs at Google? The reason why SEOs aren't bragging about having beaten ATW is that isn't on the list of things to do. Obviously, this will be a problem because for ATW to get to be a big player, they'll need a more spam resistant algo.

I've run some sample searches. ATW many times even does better than Google on searches where the topic is of academic interest, and thus has little spam and SEOed pages. ATW doesn't do so bad of a job for non-commercial searches. Which, since that is the vast majority of searches, is significant.