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Quality selection requires a very advanced sort of A.I. which is currently not available.
Instead now some highly irrelevant criteria are used, such as H1 tekst, domain name and incoming links. None of those have zilch to do with the quality of a website, of course.
Let's not have the 'Spice Girls' argument here: who really believes the Spice Girls make great music because a lot of people buy their records? Link popularity is based on the same stupid mechanism.
I would much rather prefer Google not to try play 'quality editor' which is, in my opinion, just a marketing scheme since the requirements for such are impossible yet.
Aesthetics isn't and shouldn't be the domain of search engines, who have no means of measuring such. That's the reason those irrelevant criteria are there in the first place.
Oraqref
PR is one of MANY different factors...and it's also one of the most important. It definately should not be obsessed over like some people do but it's still important.
It's far greater than being just a "tie breaker." How often do you think there is a "tie" between websites? If that's all PR was than very few people would even care about it.
Can you explain what relevance the second result has?
Would love to see and answer on this one.
But lets be honest...if someone has a PR 3 and they're up against compitition with a PR 8, the only way to beat those sites is to be FAR better than them.
PR is not simply a "tie breaker."
I don't think they do. The PR a site gets from DMOZ is all the editing a site gets.
Google is almost synonymous with PageRank™. When I think of Google I think PageRank. I think it is serving us all well.
Now maybe a guy with a jerry spinger site would not like the rankings, but i dount someone searching for a site would be concerned at all.
<--
Then again, im not a jerry springer fan. Dosent'y he have a telly show in the US which is the video equivalent of the National Enquirer and specialises in trash?
</completely off-topic attempt at humour> -->
How many other SE fellas are communicating with webmasters on a regular basis? Someties GG talks cryptic but you have to understand that.
stop all that bull**** talk
It might not have been the best way to phrase what you wanted to say imho."
That doesn't make sense, since I didn't adress that particular comment at Googleguy. Sometimes people here sound a bit too much like teenage David Bowie fans who post in a forum where David Bowie hangs around. Come on - Googleguy is just a guy who happens to work at Google and he's friendly and sometimes helpful but that's no reason to start reliving your popidol pimple years.
As to the things Google could do to improve their results - the semantic algorytm that can compare keywords to simular relevant words would be a big improvement. Maybe some sort of visual algorhytm so the standard white page with H1 text won't do so well, that H1 preference should go alltogether if you ask me.
Another great idea is user based preferences, but that's as well very complicated.
What about Google having a spellchecker algorytm, which penalizes sites with more than four spelling errors on a single page :P
Oraqref
People automatically click on anything as long as it's easy and turns up first. But anyway, that's not the interesting thing to discuss. The interesting thing is why does site turns up in the first place. A top 10 list should be like a list of athletes, the best of their kind. Now if some sloppy, drunk and drooling idiot appears at Nr 2 of the toplist that's a good reason to review the criteria that caused him to be there. And this is just a usual result - all searches I do usually have some completely irrelevant sites in a very high position.
Oraqref
I assume many pages link to that webpage using the keywords "Jerry Springer".
Jocelyn
Yesterday I was doing a search and #1 result had nothing to do with the search term.
1) PR on next 2 results was higher.
2) Search term was not on the page just like Jerry Springer example.
3) Results 2-10 had the term, were not spammy, and had more backlinks.
After checking backlinks the #1 result had no links containing the phrase searched on.
The #1 site is listed in all datacenters as #1.
This seems to be more the norm now and not the exception.
our look at the various engines that do this type of thing, indicates Google more relevant than most in search results on the whole, and as webmasters we appreciate the fact that our tiny little site, and fairly new business, nonetheless still have the opportunity to get decent rankings that drives good traffic to us.
Google is probably more advanced than any other engine in applied technology to evaluate websites for relevancy and popularity, as far as we can tell. They're trying. Hard. It's not a perfect science of course, and Google we think is constantly making changes and improvements to do better. Can't knock them, at all. Even if as a webmaster, I am not always happy with the affect on my rankings as a result of a change or improvement they make.
It's an ongoing evolutionary process. And if Google continues to see the value in this part of their business, they will continue to invest, improve and refine their techniques and what we see today will be child's play compared to what we see in the future from them.
when I do a search on <snip>
I did a search on the keyword "snip", and I'm hear to tell you that none of the sites are particularly relevant. hehe. We're getting a little out of hand here, so I thought I would join in. I can be as irrelevant as the next webmaster.
"our look at the various engines that do this type of thing, indicates Google more relevant than most in search results on the whole, and as webmasters we appreciate the fact that our tiny little site,"
This was never an argument. Of course Google is still the best search engine around. However, the new 'update' so far produces quite shabby results in my opinion that seem spookingly simular to very old databases with some freshbot results mixed in.
Oraqref
"What about Google having a spellchecker algorytm, which penalizes sites with more than four spelling errors on a single page :P "
Using your rule, you would have been penalized! Check your post.
Ahem, PR2 here after 3 months. Had 4 low PR links to my site to begin with, but last month was linked from a PR6 page with about 30 links, a PR5 (now showing gray) directory page with about 10 links, a PR4 page with about 30 links, and some more links. Still stuck at PR2.
However, interesting part is that on my searches I am doing extremely well, beyond I had hoped for.
"snip"
if you are looking for haircutters, try "haircutters" instead.
hehe
When I wrote that PR3 was trivial to get, I didn't add in that "as soon as you get listed in Google." From reading the above, looks to me like you should have enough links already to get at least PR3 after a couple more update cycles. And, in your the only reason is that you are PR2 now is that you didn't get any PR4 or better links at the very beginning. Literally, I've seen a lot of teenagers with home pages that had a PR5. Good chance that most people know someone with such home pages that they could beg a link from. And, if anyone is starting up an e-commerce site, they could buy a few PR5 links from teenagers dirt cheap at start up to get the site off the ground with decent PR. And, they'd be able to get just the right keyword rich anchor text from these teenagers too.
They greatly have increased the number of pages as 'results' for my key terms. Having said that, what they added seems to be mostly trash. I know they are the biggest and I agree they are the best...but I don't think Google 'edits' enough.
Doing formulas that will give good results is a good thing, not Google playing God.
Literally, I've seen a lot of teenagers with home pages that had a PR5.
PR3 is incredibly easy. All you have to do is become a useful member of an internet community. You won't find many DMOZ editors that don't have at least a PR3 on their home page listed in their editor's profile.
My Yahoo profile has a PR3 (real, not guessed) just from all my posts on yahoo boards. Any qualified member on my site that gets their home page on our member's homepages list currently gets PR4 just from our link.
You might want to look around and see if you might already have some decent PR of your own laying around that you do not use. None of these methods work that well for generating PR because you have to actually participate, but they work well if you already perticipate.
Like rfg says, PR3 is easy. Even PR5 is not too difficult. PR6+ is a lot more work.
For anything wondering about this anomaly, my best guess is that this is a minor case of Googlebombing. Also, for anyone who thinks this is a particularly bad result, take a look at the rest of the SERPs. The guy's official home page is #1 as would be expected, and his syndicator's page (who probably few actually link to) is #3. Next down the list is a relatively minor Angelfire fan page. Going down the SERPs, basically all I see are either minor single pages about the guy, and minor fan sites. My analysis: basically, "Jerry Springer" is an extremely uncompetitive search term. Other than the guy himself, ain't nobody really trying to SEO that SERP to do well. And, none of the rest of the sites stand out as "relevant"; just a bunch of minor pages competing against other minor pages. Looks to me that I could put up a well SEOed page about Jerry on some free website host, and with a handful of pages on other sites I control added keyword rich anchor text to that Jerry page of mine get it into the top 10. My point here being that if someone with SEO trickery could get in the top 10 for an extremely competetive SERP such as "travel" or "computers", THAT would be something I'd wonder about what is wrong with Google they could pull it off. "Jerry Springer" just ain't a competitive SERP, and a poor example to use in evaluating Google's SERPs.
Another way of looking at it is this. If I put up a site about widgets, if the content is any good then surely I should be able to get enough links from other sites about widgets to link to it to get to PR3. And, if I can't get enough links to my widget site to get it up to PR3, that is a pretty good argument that my widget site deserves to be buried in Google SERPs.
BigDave (and rfg) you are right. I am expecting to be around PR4+ once Google picks up my links. However, I had forgotten about my Yahoo account! Goal is to become mid-PR5 (PR6+ is not worth the trouble for me) which should suffice to land my site in the first page in my mostly non-cometitive keyword searches. After that I can devote my time to improve my site.
Quality selection requires a very advanced sort of A.I. which is currently not available.
Oraqref , That's the key, it will be great once it's available. Meanwhile I find I'm most likely to find what I need searching on Google.
What sold me on Google was searching for information on a serious cancer my father had three years ago. When you are searching something like that you DON'T want to find pages of obituaries! Google found me some of the top cancer sites.
I do think title and incoming links can help tell how relevant a page is but I must admit it bothers me that Google seems to be giving more emphasis on domain root pages of late. I think domain name shouldn't be used at all. It just encourages people to buy up all the good names.
I agree it measures popularity now (excluding people cheating their way in). People just need to realize that's what it measures.
Couldn't resist checking out the Jerry S search and sure enuf, you found a good one there.
A human can say this site is relevant
There is a lot of variation in human opinion. Also many sites never get looked at by a real person and few people outside of seo types even know to get DMOZ to list them.
What option do you suggest for those of us that want to find relevant sites on the web?
I'd say having separate searches for commercial and information; the problem is most sites and even pages are mixed. And some commercial sites have great information as well and we all know many non commercial sites have little or none.
PR has never been less important than it is today.
I've noticed this more lately though a PR8+ seems to always do well.
make as much sense when I read it tomorrow
Made sense to me. Is it tomorrow yet? ;)
My Yahoo profile has a PR3 (real, not guessed) just from all my posts on yahoo boards.
isn't it the same as signing guestbooks?
Don't assume that your yahoo profile will do you any good. The vast majority of them have the guessed PR showing. You have to be really active on yahoo groups with the message archive set to be publically available to even get your profile crawled.
The highest PR profile that I know of is a PR4. and the profiles will jump around each month because Google will end up crawling a different batch of messages each month.
