As I recall those post-Florida days were the start of Google’s application of digital filtering to page content. To visualize this, think of taking the first “n” words on the page, moving over “m” words and taking another “n” word series, and continuing that through the portion of the page selected for analysis. Start with n=5 and m=1. Weight the center of the 5 word string differently than the “tails”, sort of like imposing a bell curve on the value of the words (the middle words get full value, and the edge words get very low value). Consider each of those overlapping 5 word series as a data point for the statistics (keyword density etc) instead of the usual whole-set analysis. The process enables you to run more advanced analysis on the selected text, very quickly (linear agebra), without as large a data set as you might otherwise need. Compare that to the corpus (index?), and keyword-stuffed content stands out like a sore thumb even if the aggregate word stats match the corpus.

That is how I interpreted it back then, and that perspective served me well. I didn’t see a need to try and reproduce it or prove the theory, and I don’t project this as a theory of how Google worked, but it is *the* way to digitally characterize serial data. The inverse of generate is deconstruct or analyze. A filter is an inverted generator, and vice versa. Digital signal processing (DSP) is a set of mathematics for doing exactly that in an efficient manner in Base 2 (binary). That is what Google does. Today, they have more resources (money & Ph.D.’s) and the world of semantic analysis is advancing rapidly. Who knows what looms?

you can see i was excited to try to define words back in the day. I still think part of the initial florida update effect was to suppress the rankings of pages that were too blatently focused on a keyword phrase. The same way you mentioned a b testing in this post I did around Florida on some pages and got similar results…by changing the proximity of some of the core keywords on a page.

If the term “go words” was to pick up any steam, the way you mention it would surely be far more accurate (and useful) to the current search market than that page I threw up about a month after the Florida update.

Another great post John :)