Message boards as a method of comunication

[Nightwind]

Number of times being linked to is a poor measure of a websites worth:

People can set up a number of crap websites all referencing each other, webmasters can exchange links with each other.  This will fool the searchengine into thinking the site is 'good'

Wordcount of specific words is bad, as is the meta-data of what the website claims to be about, since these can both be rigged.

A real search engine would minimally require at least some form of semantic analysis of the website, but even that is ignoring graphical information.

your right, but there's no way to subectivly rate every website. There are some user mainteained and rated databases of links, but those start to look like a favorites listing after a while anyway.

If those methods i listed arn't manipulated they can work, and the sites that do pureposely take advanrage of them, would tend to be easilly spotted if it isn't up to par.