What if Google ate it's own dog food?

[Edvard]

Clever.

"Web developers increasingly grow weary of having to put so much effort into designing their sites according to the whims of the Google search engine. When the most important thing is 'getting indexed' it is increasingly difficult for web site designers to offer the simple, uncluttered user experience they'd like to. Reminiscent of the famed what if Microsoft designed the iPod box here is a humorous look at what would happen to that famed, clean, uncluttered look if Google had to design for the Google Search Engine."

http://www.meangene.com/google/design_for_google.html

from Slashdot via somewhere else I can't remember

[mouser]

Yeah this is great stuff.  So true too.

[Deozaan]

Looks like Yahoo! and other search engine portals.

[housetier]

This makes me rethink the SEO "strategy" I was using before on my site. Maybe I should just stop that nonsense and concentrate on content rather than ranking. Or make stuff easier to find for a human user than a bot...

Yes I like that thought

[Ehtyar]

Indeed, very true. It's a shame SEO works like this. IMO Google's algorithm still needs much tweaking.

Ehtyar.

[40hz]

This makes me rethink the SEO "strategy" I was using before on my site. Maybe I should just stop that nonsense and concentrate on content rather than ranking. Or make stuff easier to find for a human user than a bot...

I often suspect that Google's extreme secrecy about the internals of their search engine algorithm is less about keeping people from "gaming the system" and more about hiding just how simple minded and arbitrary it is.

That's my 

[zridling]

Wow, I've never thought of this except for how they pool news stories. Quite insightful.

[Ehtyar]

This makes me rethink the SEO "strategy" I was using before on my site. Maybe I should just stop that nonsense and concentrate on content rather than ranking. Or make stuff easier to find for a human user than a bot...

I often suspect that Google's extreme secrecy about the internals of their search engine algorithm is less about keeping people from "gaming the system" and more about hiding just how simple minded and arbitrary it is.

That's my 

+1 

Ehtyar.

[fenixproductions]

I often suspect that Google's extreme secrecy about the internals of their search engine algorithm is less about keeping people from "gaming the system" and more about hiding just how simple minded and arbitrary it is.

I am still writing "dirty code" but when I had started with programming it was looking even worse and I have never been able to understand "what, the hell, I've been thinking"

Maybe in Google's case it's the same? Maybe it's not simple code but very, very ugly one? They might think: "Why I put THAT? What does it suppose to do? Why? What? How? ... OK. It is still working so I will not touch that!"

[housetier]

The code for analyzing and ranking has become self-aware, and shut out Google's engineers until they have a pagerank of 1 gogoolplex...

[40hz]

I often suspect that Google's extreme secrecy about the internals of their search engine algorithm is less about keeping people from "gaming the system" and more about hiding just how simple minded and arbitrary it is.

I am still writing "dirty code" but when I had started with programming it was looking even worse and I have never been able to understand "what, the hell, I've been thinking"

Maybe in Google's case it's the same? Maybe it's not simple code but very, very ugly one? They might think: "Why I put THAT? What does it suppose to do? Why? What? How? ... OK. It is still working so I will not touch that!"

Ummm....yeah.  I have a few pieces of Perl code I wrote (and still use) that are like that.