"Dear Google"

http://michaelthompson.org/weblog/index.php?blogID=211

Dear Google,

Help us understand how to improve the chances of our sites getting
found beyond the advice to "Have other relevant sites link to yours."

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
PS We especially like the "Don't be evil" thing.