> I think search result quality is a bit more involved than just testing whether a page contains a set of words
Google bombs work because Google includes in the words of the current page, words in the links leading to the page (inside the anchor), and even, I believe, words in the page linking to the current page, outside of the link itself.
And then fields are weighted to calculate relevance. Those long, long urls with the title of the page in the url started to appear and proliferate when people noticed that words in the url were given an important boost factor by Google.
This broke the Internet a little, by the way. That's why we need links shorteners now, with urls containing whole goddamn paragraphs.
Google bombs work because Google includes in the words of the current page, words in the links leading to the page (inside the anchor), and even, I believe, words in the page linking to the current page, outside of the link itself.
And then fields are weighted to calculate relevance. Those long, long urls with the title of the page in the url started to appear and proliferate when people noticed that words in the url were given an important boost factor by Google.
This broke the Internet a little, by the way. That's why we need links shorteners now, with urls containing whole goddamn paragraphs.