Overall the Google search results are probably the best available but it is still frustrating to see an angelfire page somebody slapped up on a whim being ranked 100 or 200 positions ahead of much higher quality sites that had the benefit of weeks or months of development time.

The idea of ranking by inbound-linking is brilliant on the surface but it still seems vunerable to being "played", i.e. someone asks all their friends on campus, their family, etc. to link to a site or a single page and soon they are high in the search results even though the actual content found there is shoddy or not even meaningful.

At that point page ranking becomes more a measure of social networking skills and opportunities than an indicator of content quality.

We are aware that there have been recent efforts to clean this problem up and we hope they are successful.

We also hope those who continue to work on search algorithms will keep thinking of new metrics that are indicators of the quality of the site. (ie typos? broken links? longevity? actual visits? actual hits? how many people have bookmarks to the site? spelling? grammar? depth of content?)

A lot could be learned if there was a method by which webmasters could voluntarily permit Google to collect traffic information directly. The AdSense scripts could be a gateway for this, but even without them you could find a lot of webmasters willing to include a simple "Google traffic logger" on their sites.

Maybe you are already working on these sorts of things; if so, keep up the good work. If not, probably someone else will some day.

Best of luck to everyone at Google

The Webmasters