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"Any clue as to the possible role greater reliance on semantics is playing in your never ending quest for more relevant results?"
I'd say that's inevitable over time. The goal of a good search engine should be both to understand what a document is really about, and to understand (from a very short query) what a user really wants. And then match those things as well as possible. :) Better semantic understanding helps with both those prerequisites and makes the matching easier.
So a good example is stemming. Stemming is basically SEO-neutral, because spammers can create doorway pages with word variants almost as easily as they can to optimize for a single phrase (maybe it's a bit harder to fake realistic doorways now, come to think of it). But webmasters who never think about search engines don't bother to include word variants--they just write whatever natural text they would normally write. Stemming allows us to pull in more good documents that are near-matches. The example I like is [cert advisory]. We can give more weight to www.cert.org/advisories/ because the page has both "advisory" and "advisories" on the page, and "advisories" in the url. Standard stemming isn't necessarily a win for quality, so we took a while and found a way to do it better.
So yes, I think semantics and document/query understanding will be more important in the future. pavlin, I hope that partly answers the second of the two questions that you posted way up near the start of this thread. If not, please ask it again in case I didn't understand it correctly the first time. :)
Calm down and just wait until it settles!
I'm sorry, just it seems that many people are seeing different things, I dont want to seem alone here especially with these *nice things* I am seeing. My guess is that these SERPS, not the 64. that GG said would probably roll out will actually make it to the final Brandy update. I hope this is the case as they are much better than anything I have seen from G in the past 6 months.
[edited by: djgreg at 1:16 pm (utc) on Feb. 17, 2004]
From where I stand I see the OOP filter (or whatever you want to call it) being relaxed, and I also think that the prerequisites for being considered an 'authority site' have been diminished somewhat.
It is good to see, *some* sites that provided good content and relevant products that were wiped out by Florida and Austin are now back.
vrtlw:
I am really confused in what you might be seeing, but for me for all the keywords I am monitoring (~100) www2 and www3 are showing the 64 reuslts as GG said.
I can't see why not trust in him, I can't remember him saying anything wrong anytime.
djgreg,
I just stickied you a word doc with some serps
[added]I'll put that in a word doc if you really want too[/added]
Now, truth be told, we have not done any super-serious SEO. Yet.
Q: Why is my site interesting as a diagnostic tool?
A: Because it has terrible on-page optimisation (it's almost all gifs) but unbelievably great anchor text links in on one particular competitive 2-word phrase (thousands of pages across a network of sites with PR4-8 (pages not links) and thousands more below that level). By the way the phrase is highly relevant to the site's actual content!
Let me make clear before I go on that I am *NOT* complaining. I'm more interested in less competitive but more specific phrases.
Here is what has happened to this so far
The site has previously fluctuated between #4 and #8 for this phrase.
Before the weekend I was stuck around #8 for a while. The initial shuffle saw the site at #3. Now I am down to #9 on www; still at #3 on www2 (with totally different top two!); #11 on Yahoo and #1 on AOL!
If anyone is remotely interested I can give them the final position when it all shakes out.
Henry
