[Radix]

This is an interesting article, I learned from it.

[Lazamataz]

Oodles of Googles.

[newgeezer]

If you like Google, you'll love Dave's Quick Search Deskbar.*

[Ff--150]

bttt

[Maceman]

Well, whoda thunk it? The Boston Globe finally printed something useful.

[LiteKeeper]

read later

[Wright is right!]

It IS interesting. But I still disagree with the premise under which Gargle operates - that the most relevant page to your search terms is THE MOST POPULAR - i.e., the page with the most links to it. To my mind, that has absolutely NO bearing on its relevance.

This has actually done great harm to my business, which I spent a great deal of time optimizing so it would show up at the top of all of the major search engines. This is because I made it highly relevant to people searching for equipment I sell in the telephone industry.

And then Gargle tweaked its algorithm to increase the weighting for popularity. And my traffic has plummetted. With Google, you have to be the most popular, with tons of other places linking to you - which is hard in the business end of things, since everyone in my field is a COMPETITOR who is about as likely to link to me as X-42(i) is to emulate Helen Keller.

Of course, Google perhaps had a profit motive in mind - you can still BUY your way to the top with Google AdWords, but the days of getting there on your own relevant merits are over.

Michael

[baseballmom]

Thanks. I love useful articles like this.

[dead]

Bump. I had no idea about that phone number trick.

[Van Jenerette]

...thanks!

[snopercod]

Did you learn why google.com no longer indexes FreeRepublic? Something happened - either at google or FreeRepublic - during the first week of February, 2002.

Before that date, a search for "Jim Robinson site:www.freerepublic.com would return tens of thousands of hits. After that date, the same search would return only hundreds.

My pet theory was that it was due the WP/LAT lawsuit, but I really don't know.

[q_an_a]

While some of this may be true, I typed in the first exercise on name and zip and got nothing like the story. What is interesting is if someone is in another cournty and you look them up, google will translate the page into english.

[nicmarlo]

bookmarked!

[Truth666]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=diana+tomlinson