Attending the Google Party GoogleDance 2005 yesterday I
found myself with a beer right besides the Google engineers Matt Cutts and Paul whos surname I don't know.

Before the information overload continues I'll summarize some nice quotes of the engineers
as well as insights and speculations from myself. (quotes are italic)

Links are a de-valued currency these days : well - we know this with link dampening in effect for 1+ year
and the ramp for link power getting flatter and flatter meaning you need even more time for your links to develop in Google

in 5 years from now (or ealier) Google won't care anything about the media you publish your content in - may it be Flash, CSS, XML
- whatever - Google strives hard to view the content as the user sees it : technolgy is ready to render a web page and split it up in typical sections like "navigation area", "banner area", etc…

VIPS tools and demos are available and run fine on my laptop - so they will run perfect on the Google document interpretation datacenters and find spam links not only by taking their font-size(like 6px) and their color (like white-on-white… hihi)

a ballpark figure for one full index of Google is roughly 40 TB (Terabyte) - that's 40000 Gigabyte - a lot of data to transfer back and forth from the datacenters

there's never the same index data version on all Google datacenters - sounds like the rolling update is in full effect to cope with the sheer amount of data

there are a lot of reasons for the duplicate content filters - especially staying within the given budgets for crawling, ranking, page analysis Google would not be able to index and keep everything in the index

if your products are fine and unique, upload them to Froogle - it's free - vertical search results above the Top1 SERP will give you a premium position without even bothering for organic search results

if you are a local business, make sure your domain data holds your address to let the local engines work out the right business location

Pagerank degrades due to spam signals - nothing really new but Matt Cutts again confirmed that Pagerank is NOT only an indicator of link popularity anymore but is already a good mix of various content-related metrics (yes Spam or not-Spam is a content metric) … this could be observerd thruout the whole year already.