I've seen a lot of people worrying lately about how fair, equitable, accurate, or helpful Google's page rankings are. Dave is puzzled that he has an unreasonably high ranking when you search for "Dave", and likewise an unreasonably low ranking when you search for "weblog".

Come on, people. Google's ranking system is based on heuristics, and sometimes those heuristics will give good results, sometimes bad. Google is a huge improvement on what went before, but the difference is just that their heuristics are better (and, incidentally, much more expensive to calculate).

Furthermore: it has to be that way. Given the weak semantics of HTML, the different ways of writing and structuring web pages, and the very different things that different people think are important, there's no "one true way"; heuristic ranking is the only thing that makes sense.