My main point is that even when/if you narrow the audience down to the geo and the niche you will be left with a handful of pages…. those pages will be ordered by optimization standards (most links, best keyword usage, domain name, etc) For instance: assume five sites about baseball legend “Babe Ruth” – then let’s assume that the content on all the sites is ORGINAL and good articles, the sites are all hosted in the U.S. and all the searchers are from New York…. who gets the top listing?
Content – original content is sometimes licensed by something like Associated Press…. so on articles like this – what site will out rank what site? What about original articles with massive duplicates on the same subject … Reuters vs A.P. articles? surely if the engines are still algorithmic the best optimized site wins (best being keywords, most links, domain, trustrank, age, etc, etc) ? How could this NOT be unless a human got involved? How would they do it? It would be curious, for sure, when CNN can’t get top ratings because all the local news stations were out ranking them on national stories….
Country Hosting – this seems like a mistake when you consider world new sites (BBC, etc) – for instance will FoxNews outrank BBC because it is hosted in the USA and I am in the USA? What about global websites? For instance a site in France reviewing in english a casino in Macau?
Geo-IP – doesn’t currently work very well because of dynamic IP addresses.. being a satellite user I know that first hand.
Reaction to a site – this is definitely already being used, and I do agree the engines are getting smarter. Hopefullly that will mean less black-hat tricks that will hopefully be more limited.
Just my thoughts….. :tongue: ….. fire away !!