[AQXt]

So, you are re-implementing Altavista, Lycos and other old search engines.

They used the naive approach: you searched for "steak", and they would bring the pages which included the word "steak".

The problem is that people could fool these engines by adding a long sequence like "steak, steak, steak, steak, steak, steak" to their site -- to pretend that they were the most authoritative page about steaks.

Google's big innovation was to count the referrers -- how many pages used the word "steak" to link to that particular page.

The rest is history.

[frogpelt]

Effective Google search is also history.

I understand they are trying to maximize ad revenue and search does work very well for people who are looking for products or services.

But it no longer works well for finding information that is even slightly obscure.

[wolverine876]

> The problem is that people could fool these engines by adding a long sequence like "steak, steak, steak, steak, steak, steak" to their site -- to pretend that they were the most authoritative page about steaks.

I don't see a lot of people investing in SEO to boost their Marginalia results.

[eitland]

> Google's big innovation was to count the referrers -- how many pages used the word "steak" to link to that particular page.

Then people fooled Google into showing the White House as top result when searching for "a miserable failure".

At the moment marginalia's approach of sorting pages into quality buckets based on lack of JS seems to be working extremely well, but of course it will be gamed if it gets popular.

However, I'd rather want SEO-crafting to consider itself with minimizing JS, rather than spamming links into every comment field on every blog across the globe ;-)