[tyingq]

That's interesting, and would explain why no replacement was named for Matt.

I wonder how much they actually improved the webspam thing.

The search results you see today, versus years past, suggest a sort of "cheat" to do that...something like a seed set of trusted sites (big brands, universities, government sites, etc) , and weighting based on distance from those seeds.

I say that because I'll often get results that are heavy on authority, but low on relevance. What I'm looking for is on pages 2 and 3, on more niche, less prominent sites. It didn't used to be that way.