Will PageRank Last?

Is it just me or are the search engine spammers figuring out how to game PageRank and whatever other algorithms the search engines have come up with?

I did a search last night on 'pseudafed while breastfeeding' because my wife is sick and breastfeeding. On Yahoo, the top 10 results all had the name of a drug that starts with Z in the title and all of the urls ended in messages/somenumber.html. I won't name the 'Z' drug here because I wouldn't want my super popular blog to help their PageRank :))

Googles results seemed marginally better - with only 4 of the top 10 containing the same 'Z' medication. My favorite result link was one which had the same 'Z' drug in the title 3 times. The page itself displayed blank for me in Firefox, but actually contained lots of links to...you guessed it...pages referencing the 'Z' drug.

The big question is - will the search engines find a way to keep this from tainting the results or will they have to abandon PageRank schemes altogether?

Programming Theorems

Here's a blog post you developer geeks out there should appreciate:

http://www.destraynor.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/102-Programming-Theorems.html

Information Sharing

I recently called an insurance company to get a quote for car insurance. I was a little taken aback by how much the insurance company already knew about me. After telling them my SSN, they know that I was married and knew my wife. They also knew exactly what types of cars we owned and for how long.

Apparently all of the major insurance companies all now share this information via a company called ChoicePoint.

I wonder how long it will be before health and life insurers will try to get access to credit card records to see how much fast food we are eating in order to fine tune their risk profiles...