willybfriendly - 4:41 am on Jun 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

>Does quality include the appearance of a site, or only the content?

Quality sites are made of quality pages, and quality SE's take me to the page with the info I am looking for. (Hard to find an SE that consistantly does that anymore:()

I have come across, and bookmarked, some pretty ugly sites when the info was important to me.

>How about the organization of a site?

It is nice to be able to find things. That said, I regualrly use "site: query" when the site is difficult to find things on. Some really big sites can take a long time to drill down into.

>Can a site be an authority if it's not government, educational, or from a big corporation?

No doubt about it. I often find info about MS products on non-MS sites, as well as drivers, dll's, etc.

For a generic example, Mother Earh News often has more practical info than a govt. site dealing with sustainability or organic ag, and there are other, smaller sites with even better info than Mother Earth.

>Is it possible for an authority to not be quality?

When I visit microsoft.com with Opera it becomes quite apparent that authority sites can lack quality ;)

FEMA is an authority, but there is little doubt that it lacks quality.

WBF