Another Dominic theory

The Hilltop thing

[Powdork]

Perhaps the index we are seeing now is only part of the whole (I think we'd mostly agree on that), but a specific part of the whole. There may be a subset of experts which are being used to rerank their respective categories and they form a separate index, which has yet to be folded back into the main index that we are seeing now. Mysitewhichhasfallensogreatly.com and others would easily fit into this category. It is a local directory with more content than any other in its locality. Not more listings, but in each case more content associated with the listings. In many cases there is more unique content about the company linked to than on the company's site itself. This theory could explain some of the links pages that just went missing and are now back. It could also explain the missing backlinks. The expert pages (non spammy directory, links, resource pages) would be ranked according to a separate algo and then folded back into the main index, as soon as it reaches all the datacenters.
[cs.toronto.edu...]
Maybe?

[MetropolisRobot]

Powdork. That'a a very interesting document there. I would have thought though that they would have done this sooner than now if they were going to implement it. Not sure though.

[jeremy goodrich]

Try doing a google search for 'hilltop algorithm' you'll get (last time I checked) the original thread on it here at WebmasterWorld. :)

More likely, if some research is influencing the changes behind the scenes, it's current stuff like BlockRank, Adaptive PageRank, and Quadratic Extrapolation -> and not research that was done published in 1999, I believe...

[Powdork]

They have, with Google News
www.rediff.com/us/2002/oct/18us.htm

[jeremy goodrich]

I see the same scientist in that story, but no mention of the hilltop algorithm...

[steve128]

I can quite understand all the hypothesis and many have excellent well thought out ideas.

But what I cannot seem to grasp, is why make the "test"
live all this could have been done behind the scenes.

Sorry if not a test, but the data is 1/2 months old for most. So it cannot be an update, a backdate maybe.
(everflux accepted)

But then again if nothing had happened, a thread 30 pages long would be... when will the update occur!

[MetropolisRobot]

Yes, in our business we would have been dead if we had released without a test/QA session first. In fact we are just going through it all now with the next release.

Data conversion is our biggest headache as we move forward and we cannot allow people to have any stale problems. neither can we have any functionality go wrong.

But then we do not have the clout of Google. We're still building our market position.