Analysis of Florida

NeilDurrant · 11-12-03

Detailed article examining Florida and new algos.

Any opinions on merits of this articles findings?

http://www.optitext.com/pub/florida-report.html

matbennett · 11-12-03

Interesting analysis, but the overall gist still seems to be "Don't know. Best sit tight".

Must admit that, like the author, I was coming to the conclusion that the current results just cannot be what they intended and they would at some point be "fixed". As time passes, that conclusion is changing into little more than a vague hope!

I still think that there are more changes to come though. Some of the results I have seen are just so loaded with spam that it seems that some of the basic filters are not in place at the moment. I suspect that the new algo (whatever it may be) is here to stay, but we will see a lot of the current top results drop when filters come back online. Sadly, this is all based on 90% hunch 10% hope & 0% science.

Anyone who enjoyed this may like the piece on www.seo-tests.com as well.

adigaskell · 26-12-03

Read quite a good article in the Jim World newsletter today. Their theory was that the patent for PageRank was held by Stanford University and the US government (Standford because Page and Bryn studied there when they developed the pr algo, US government because their studies were funded by a US gov't grant).

Anyway in order to pull off their IPO issues such as this need resolving. Current thinking is that Google license the PR technology from Stanford. It could be that Google are trying to modify the page rank algorithm enough to bypass patent law and thus be able to float, hence the strange results in Florida. Remember that Google bought Applied Semantics not too long ago as well.

You can find out more at http://www.jimworld.com/gazette/issu...053114758.html