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Optimization Filters

Another popular idea was the Google had become frustrated about the amount of highly optimized but content-light sites in its index and had implemented some kind of optimization filter. If, after analyzing on-and-off-page optimizations for a query phrase, a certain threshold was reached, the page was chucked from the results. Again the theory didn't fit well with observations as many optimized sites could still be found ranking well whereas a number of unoptimized sites had vanished. Stemming, the ability to search for derivatives of a single keyword, was introduced at around the same time as Florida and was another suspect although no-one could explain why this would affect commercial sites only.

The Austin update at the end of January 2004 made further modifications. As the changes began to settle down, and some excluded sites made their way back into the index, comment centered on Google's bag of patented technologies and whether LocalRank, Hilltop or even Topic-Sensitive PageRank algorithms had been included as part of the search. These algorithms overcome limitations with PageRank which indicates if a page is popular but not if it is popular for the keywords in the user's query.

Optimization Filters

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