On Thu, Mar 15, 2001 at 03:07:30PM -0800, Scott Francis wrote:

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The same way people have learned to make sure that a search for "Anna Kournikova" (for instance) returns, say, 200 records that are sites/pages that have nothing whatever to do with Anna Kournikova, and a whole LOT to do with bringing in cash to the sites in question.

This is self-defeating in the end; if your search site doesn't work, people will stop using it.

Yes, but it's not the search engines that do it. It's the web sites that have learned how to put stuff in the view of the crawlers the search engines use that will show up when someone is looking for unrelated content. Since they do this in such a way that virtually EVERY search engine finds their bogus content, they don't care how many search engines go out of business, they'll just afflict the next one to come up.

If they stop using it, the advertising dollars will stop rolling in.

Thus, it's in the best interest of the owner of the search site to fix the problem. Hence why people are flocking to the latest best technology they can find, such as Google.

Google is not immune to this, althoug it is better than some. Owen