Sometimes things will come up in conversation that bear repeating, but where the barrier to packaging it in a ‘publishable’ form seems too high for whatever your time restraints at the moment. So this is a snippet of a conversation with the inimitable Joe Clark that pertains to his article on Google:

MM: Logical points.
MM: I think Google’s update cycle for all but a few is ridiculous though
MM: it favors fresh content, but it’s out of sync with what’s fresh
MM: I remember one engine, perhaps Teoma when it first started, offered *instant* inclusion

MM: I think a system like what you suggest would be abused, but in a way so easily trackable and correctable it would actually help to weed out junk.
JC: I see.
MM: Let’s say you “ping” Google telling them your page has updated. They check, get newest content, integrate it, the world is a better place and everyone is happy. Let’s say you resubmit the page an hour later, hoping to get a fresh bonus or something, it would slap you on the wrist for having no new or significantly different content.
MM: If the page was, say, 20% different, then it probably should be reindexed, and the old page should be dropped from the index because none of that is there anymore.
JC: Well, that’s making sense.
MM: Plus it can tie this all in with the link-votes pageranking to give instant pageranks to every page, instead of the psuedo-pageranks they often use now
MM: I forsee a day when you hover over a link and it preemptively tells you the pagerank of the linked page in a tooltip or the status bar.
JC: Cripes, kid, you’ve got a visionary hidden underneath there.
JC: Are you gonna publish this s— or what?
JC: then again, you’re not done yet. carry on.
MM: And if the page isn’t in the index yet, get it! Moreover what are they doing with all that juicy information they’re getting from Google Toolbars? I’m sure something interesting could be done with that, a la [that company that starts with an A] but with more relevant ranking than pure traffic.
MM: Publish? Not enough time.
MM: Google is always looking for new things to do with their current data, but they’ve done very little in terms of making their data more timely.
JC: just copy and paste what you wrote and blog ‘er.

It’s hard to say no to Joe, so here I am.