Link Building, which Google says will occur completely naturally if you have really great content, is fairly easy to manipulate. So instead of relying on webmasters to tell Google which sites are important, Google is going to ask YOU, the searcher, what you think is important. And you are going to tell them, whether you know it or not. Sure, you can tell them what you think is important by which search results you click on. You can communicate to Google which websites you think should be demoted by hitting the "back" button and repeating your search. Google is listening to what you have to say by your behavior. But are they bugging your computer? A bug in every new app it seems: Search History Web History Geo-Targeting & Related Searches Trends for Websites More Toolbars Google Chrome Google Bookmarks Google SearchWiki http://labs.google.com/
How is this proof that Google is shifting away from Page Rank? Sorry but you make a lot of misleading claims without much to back it up. You seem to be making an extra effort to start sensationalized threads. Google will still rely on PageRank for a long time. Shifting to behavioral models would just be too open to manipulation from spammers.
You don't think linking is open to manipulation from spammers??? They're still going to utilize linking (which is another human behavior). In my opinion, these behavioral patters are a lot more difficult to fake. You'd have to create thousands if not millions of fake accounts, utilize thousands if not millions of dedicated proxies - geographically normalized, & build up a natural behavioral history for each... and you'd have to simulate realistic behaviors for each...
Of course links can be manipulated by spammers, but that kind of manipulation may be easier to detect. Detecting behavioral spam may be extremely difficult. Search engines have had behavioral data for a long time. So why would they suddenly switch after basing rankings on links for so long? It is an unproven ranking strategy that would be too risky.
Please check his profile history and check all his threads. Same topic, different threads. Seems he just knows behavioral search and nothing else. He does so as to show his signature selling cheap hosting.
Maximizationator, While this idea is nothing new, I do see it as the future of google. Think about it. Links are easy to find for research, and SEO experts are always one step behind google when they change their algorithms. Of course the details are never known, but once social sites are devalued, reciprocal links are devalued, etc. we know pretty soon afterwards. With social algorithms, SEO experts will not be able to manipulate the serps as well, because there will be nothing to research. Google wants to show sites that are relevant, and users stay or purchase something on a site that is relevant to their search term. How can someone in SEO follow that? It may be difficult and a long process, but I betcha any $$ google will go this route someday.
Goodbye Maximizationator. Yes it would be tougher to manipulate social algorithms for the average seo. It would probably be easier for hacker black hat seo's though. With a few clicks of the mouse they could propell their websites to the top of the search engines...or propell their competitors to the bottom. All spammer seo companies would change their strategies to include automating clicks/votes for their clients.-
Nah - you can't spoof combinatorial verified/trusted igoogle accounts (phone numbers, credit cards, history, etc), ISP activity (Google has now teamed with ISPs to ensure off-page analytics reliability), normailized geographic IP distribution, MAC addresses, Browser referrers & logs, Toolbar logs, Google Gears... and on and on. There are too many checks & balances now.
So someone has a point of view, and a business to promote. What's wrong with that? Your sig is full of links as well. At least he has an opinion, as opposed to you. Why don't you do some research and thinking of your own, instead of snooping through other people's activities?
If google wanted to know what you were looking at it would use website hits for serps but it doesn't because that can be automated.
As I said, you can't spoof it. Not anymore. While you can spoof an IP address via a proxy or a MAC address, you can't spoof your ISP, which is now paid to relay usage statistics to Google. Nor can you spoof verified iGoogle accounts with verified bank / credit card accounts & phone numbers. And Google isn't going to count the same clicks from the same machine over & over again, so any script you might come up with would be defeated. Checks & balances, mate. Google now has (almost) as much analytics/intelligence on individuals as NSA, for God's sake. Do you consider it a coincidence that Google CEO, Eric Schmidt was on Obama's Transition Advisory Board? "A Greener Google" my butt. It is about individual profiling for highly targeted marketing ... and defeating ... spam. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_E._Schmidt
Google just wants to provide the most relevant solutions(search results) to whatever problems or questions you have(whatever you are searching for), so that you will be happy and keep coming back and clicking their ads. They definitely take 'bounce rate' into account. If lots of people click 'back' after going to your site when being sent from search results, you're rankings aren't going to last very long as it means that your site isn't solving whatever keyword it is being listed for, and google is tracking that. Just produce good content for whatever term you are trying to rank for, and your bounce rate will be low.
I think he's on to something. Or at least I think that PR has been greatly devalued over the last few months. I've been trying to figure out what Google is switching to. That sucks... no more tricking the serps.. I guess we'll have to start building decent websites that people actually want to visit in order to rank high. lame.