heini - 11:44 am on Mar 30, 2003 (gmt 0)

Not sure why you think there is no strong academic background. As I said Fast has a huge staff of PHDs recruited from the NTNU.

Apart from that I don't think Fast or any other SE cares what SEOs think about them. They care about their product, and they care about marketshare.
If you say you find ATW serps not satisfactory, okay, that's open to debate. Some people would agree, some would not.
But to think ATW would have a higher marketshare if they had academic papers flying around - hmmm.

About SEO targeting ATW it's obviously exactly like rfgdxm1 says: people optimise /spam for Google 90% of the time, and just see how that works out in other engines. It's rather stray spam as far as ATW is concerned.

Anyway, most likely this is a futile debate insofar as the ATW team and algo will be merged with AV team and algo. The process is going to be overseen by Gary Flake, who has lots of research papers out; add that to all the AV papers and patents, and you have a solid pile of papers to read through :)