I think Homer Simpson summed it up best when he said, “Facts are meaningless, they can be used to prove anything!”

Sadly you can make poor numbers seem like you are going in the right direction when totally lost. But at the same time sometimes a drop in visitors isn’t a bad thing if page views/conversions/sign-ups increase. End of the day it’s common sense that can work that out. Too bad common sense isn’t that common anymore.

Sites that measure quality based on popularity over a wide spectrum seldom offer anything I’m interested in. But, sites designed to appeal to niches I’m interested in that measure popularity among the members of that niche often have just what I want.

So I think the answer is to encourage free access to the Web, and to encourage the creation of as many niche marketing sites as there are niches to support them. Then, anything worthwhile will find popularity somewhere. Caravaggio had to have some patrons, or he would have starved. Anyone who has ever been of importance to the world was able to attract at least some followers / admirers.

Finally, search needs to become more niche oriented; results relevant to one niche might be meaningless to another. (When I search for “spears” I want to know how the weapons were made and used, not what a certain utterly dull but somehow still popular individual has done to repulse me now.) I think that will be the real key to the future of search; figuring out a way to define niches and sort results by their relevance to those niches. As it is, I rely less and less on Google, and more and more on certain specialty sites I’ve found whose content appeals to me.