On Fri, 2005-06-10 at 06:26 -0700, Bill Moseley wrote:
> You mean google's famous "Page Rank"?  They are not adjusting the
> results by the text of the <a> tag, but by the number of links.

They do weight the <a> tag more heavily based on the weight of the
source page.  If page A is ranked highly and page A links to page B then
the terms used to link to page B are ranked with page A's weight.  So if
page A is ranked very highly then linking to page B with <a>Foo Bar
Baz</a> causes B to have similar weight to page A when searching for Foo
Bar Baz.

> And even with billions of pages it turns out easy to hack.  I think
> the search for "miserable failure" is a common example.

And it's easy to hack even with a single popular web page.  My
webaugur.com site is popular enough that I can skew almost any mundane
Google search by linking to a page with the text <a>Some Words to
Skew</a>.

For example:
  http://www.google.com/search?q=linux+and+gnome

-- 
 David Norris
  http://www.webaugur.com/dave/
  ICQ - 412039