Will Google use non-link references as a signal?

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>> CUTTS: This question comes from Boston. Eric Enge asks, "Do you think web search will

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ever make use of references (web site mentions that are not links) as a ranking signal?"

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So, there are two answers. The first one is I never want to take a ranking signal off

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the table like, you know, I've joked that if the face of the moon can help us rank search

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that's better, I'm willing to use the face of the moon. At the same time, think about

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how people would attack the use of references. Right now, a lot of people rely on getting

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links. If all they have to do is have, you know, example.com in text, then you can leave

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that as comments all over the web and all over the blogs and all over the forums, and

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it would almost be anywhere you could stamp, any user-generated content, people would be

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leaving those references. So, you know, that's the sort of reason why you might be skeptical

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about why we'd use this sort of signal because people could abuse that sort of thing. They

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could just leave mentions of the URLs even if they can't generate links. But I'll, you

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know, I'll say, you know, we're willing to look at it, you know, we would run the analysis.

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We would say, "Is there a way to pull out a signal from that noisy data where we could

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find a way to improve it?" But that's--it would definitely be the sort of thing where

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people would try to abuse it.