Google argues that in the early days of search engines, there was a Heisenberg-like choice. (If you recall, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle observed that one the more precisely you observed a subatomic particle's momentum, the less precisely you knew its position -- and vice versa.)
Similarly, search engines were limited by their servers to either analysing a large number of pages imprecisely, or a small number of pages accurately. You therefore see occasional glitches such as the one Will pointed out. Technology, though, is changing this. Last fall I sat in a two-day seminar with Google engineers and they claimed that this distinction was going to disappear -- that it will soon be possible to evaluate huge quantities of data to a very precise degree. So perhaps Will will get his wish :-) An aside - part of the improved analysis will very probably include stronger study of site semantics, taxonomy, XML sitemaps, etc., which will allow better understanding of content quality and perhaps even synonym-level analysis. While many of us watched the weight of semantics such as proper H tag use, metadata, etc. diminish in search engine ranking because of SEO abuses, I bet we see it increase again as they ramp up the precision factor. Well-designed content structure will be seen as more easily understood, and more easily presented. This also allows Google to present your site more clearly within their search engine. Google "Texas Instruments" or "Nortel" to see examples of sites whose structure and content are searchable from within Google's results page. bests, Alex O'Neal UX manager P.S. A good place to check a given page's semantics can be found here: http://www.w3.org/2003/12/semantic-extractor.html ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
