I read it in "The Art of SEO" which I just finished.
I believe it was sourced as part of a speech from a Google VP sometime in 2007 or 2008.
What's happening is that the scammers are training the users to use longer and longer search queries. It's much harder to trick a system that is working off of 6 keywords than it is a system that is only using 2. Long-tail stuff continues to get more and more important.
> training the users to use longer and longer search queries.
no, it isn't. it's a piece of cake. ... because there just is no competition. so the only thing you have to do is to create content that google sees as valuable (and a webpage that fullfills basic usage metrics requirements) ... but also the return is lower, that's were content farms come on in.
the art of SEO is one of the worst seo books ever, seo is a business, and that book is the worst book ever from oreily. 4 authors republish their outdated blogposts, stapled together in a near random way by an overwhelmed "editor".
I wrote a longer reply, but the more I write the more I realize how ignorant I am. I'm out of my depth. Beats me.
I think we can agree that if it is true that 25% of all searches are completely new to Google, it's not like they could have been gamed. Can't game a search that has never existed before. Right?
I've optimized for queries that have never happened before. A big fraction of that 25% comes from hyper-specific queries from a known pool of terms. One could optimize for, e.g.:
[size] [color] [quality] widgets
And have a page that ranked for:
Brobdingnagian Fuchsia Middling Widgets
Even if that term had never been searched. You wouldn't have to try too hard--your bespoke widget company could just list all of the types of widgets it could potentially manufacture.
Can you cite that? That's very interesting.