Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would only show up as a parameter "relevant" to whatever sites were next in the clickstream. Remember, not every page transition is Google -> other site. They'd also be gobbling up tons of random things from forums and whatnot (which should appear on long tail searches, if we knew where to look), most of which spam the heck out of you with random parameters, forum names, and whatnot. > I see no justification for t…
You said 'utf-8' shows up as a parameter in almost every English Google search, and suggested that this would cause weird associations between 'utf-8' and random pages. I pointed out that there's no reason to expect this to be true, because Bing engineers are likely smart enough to realize that if the probability of clicking on to foo.com is not significantly different than the probability of clicking on to bar.com g…
And yet, it will link random text to websites even if they appear only in Google's URLs. I realize you're talking about discrimination (as in, "what's the better result for utf-8?"), but if the code is generic, it ought to be generic in this respect as well. After all, it linked up random nonsense to random sites given nothing more than Google's say-so, even though there's plenty of information out there about, say, rim.com that would tend to indicate that nobody except Google thinks that random text is relevant to an otherwise well-known site.
> How do you know that they don't? Google pointed out some longtail results that look bad, and you yourself pointed some out in a previous comment.
Indeed, I do not know. I know that it would be dumb to link those things to random sites, but you are correct that I do not know if they're doing things that dumb.
> I don't assume that they don't; I'm just saying there's no evidence that they do, and that assertions of wrongdoing based on the belief that they do are just irresponsible speculation.
Well, for one, I'm not really asserting "wrongdoing" here. That is, I don't particularly think that it's wrong of them to do things this way. My interest is mainly technical, so I'm more interested in figuring out exactly what they're doing rather than blaming them for it. As such, I'm going for the most likely explanations I can find, rather than worrying about whether it's been proven to such an extent that they can be blamed for it (as I'm not really going to blame them anyhow).
You may have seen where I pointed out that I don't think it will "ruin search" in the end because they should expect a crapflood from spammers now that it's clear that they use clickstream data to rank sites. After all, there's a large spam attack right now on a tiny wiki for a game I play. I have to think Bing is more of a target than that. I can't prove that, true, I'm just playing the odds here.