msndude - 2:53 pm on Jun 18, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm in interested that an authority site could have such low quality as to be unusable. Since we're in business to serve our customers, it's hard to justify making much of an effort to find or serve that kind of authority though. In fact, the Japanese-language site for an automobile might be a great authority, but we still don't want to serve it to our US customers. Perhaps we need an independent category "authoritative but useless."

I'm also interested in SteveB's implication that a quality site could be off-topic. Do you (any of you) think that quality is query-independent? I've been thinking of both quality and authority as a property of results, not just a property of a site.

It makes the discussion a lot easier, though, if authority depends on the query but quality does not. So webmasterworld would be a quality site, and would be an authority for queries like "webmaster information" but not for queries on medical issues.

Or is that not how people really use the terms?