From the Register, 01/10/2003.

"Google has made no secret of its goal to "understand" the web, an acknowledgement that its current brute-force text index produces search results with little or no context.

The popularity of Teoma demonstrates that even a small index can produce superior results for certain kind of searches. Teoma leans on existing classification systems.

While Google relied on PageRank™ to provide context, all was well. But PageRank is now widely acknowledged to be broken, so new, smarter tricks are required.

Regarded as heresy when we raised the issue last spring, now some of Google's warmest admirers, MetaFilter's Matt Haughey and web designer Jason Kottke have acknowledged the problem.

As Gary Stock noted here last May, Google "didn't foresee a tightly-bound body of wirers. They presumed that technicians at USC would link to the best papers from MIT, to the best local sites from a land trust or a river study - rather than a clique, a small group of people writing about each other constantly. They obviously bump the rankings system in a way for which it wasn't prepared."

Although it's tempting to suggest that bloggers broke PageRank™ it might equally be the case that the Blog Noise issue is emblematic rather than causal. Blog Noise - in the form of 'trackbacks', content-free pages and other chaff - is the most visible manifestation, but mindless list-generators are also to blame for Google's poor performance. And the truth is every successful search engine will find itself engaged in an arms race with gamers. (Deliciously, in the case of email spammer Elwyn Jenkins, a former e-currency salesman who proselytizes weblogs by day, and by night offers advice on how to improve your PageRank, the bloggers and the Google gamers are one and the same [includes screenshots]). "