most of the benefit of the technique comes from recreating google results I'm not 100% sure this is the case. Consider that an user wants a chicken enchilada

most of the benefit of the technique comes from recreating google results I'm not 100% sure this is the case. Consider that an user wants a chicken enchilada recipe. 1. They go to a site that they trust for high quality data. (I like food&wine, saveur, epicurious, rick bayless for mexican, ...) 2. They search for "chicken enchilada" 3. They select the most appealing result (not necessarily the first one), based on author, snippet, rating, photo, etc. Domain knowledge. If you can associate (via the referrer) "chicken enchilada" with that page, you've encapsulated a lot of information - manual selection of site, manual selection of a page within that site. It's potentially useful (especially for long tail - people who have to go directly to sites because search engines fail them). Is there too much noise? Perhaps - you'd really have to look at the raw data to find out. Maybe you only want to look at "q=", "search=", and whatever phpBB, etc use. Maybe the signal that rises out of that noise is valuable. One big downside is that the results would be biased towards the preferences of people who install toolbars. :) The other downside is that SEOs could game the system by feeding MS bad data. (True if they're only looking at google data, too.)