Modern Day Search Engine Manipulations

An anonymous reader writes "I fondly recall the days of yore when search engines could be manipulated just by sticking thousands of extraneous filler words in the META tags or hidden at the bottom of the page. Nowadays search engines work by more advanced techniques that generally don't fall prey to these simplistic tactics, but it'd be folly to presume them impervious. Does it still happen?"

Comments

Nitwit didn't do the reading.

[mbauser2]

He says:

I do not have access to Google's page ranking technology, and apart from some partial details on their site, they keep their ranking techniques tight lipped to avoid intentional rank manipulating. As such, everything I say in this article is purely speculative based upon analysis of search results for various terms and phrases

No details? They published the algorithm in 1999! If he looked it up, he would have understood PageRank is a page-to-page relationship (not site-to-site), and avoided the idiotic statement "Is it really a democracy that every page on these megalinked aggregate sites become premiere voices of their topic?".

Apparently, this moron didn't even search Google -- the paper is the third result for a search on "PageRank". Why are we taking search engine advice from some imbecile who doesn't use search engines?

The Google team publishes more inside information than any search engine. There's a whole ODP category for Google research papers.

To put that into perspective, there are some 750 pages dealing with mantids that are linked from Google, and that limit is simply because that's the maximum results that Google will return for a particular search term.

That's not even true. Google will return up to 1000 results in a search. Can this guy even count?

There are a lot of better resources about Google on the Web. Why did Slashdot go with this guy?