When talking of the Jagger updates (1-3) the forums are full of people defending it in the belief that its "relevance" somehow explains away the incompetence of its current state: some say rankings now depend on the age of a site; others refer to governmental bodies dominating the top positions. But on my own web turf the following is what Google has struggled for a year to usher in: utter irrelevance.



For weeks the returns for "web site design bangkok" had positions 5-9:

1) Occupying position 5 is: Bangkok hotel and Thailand travel guide. Instead of looking at the title and on-page copy they have used the link url of the designers, Web Design Copyright © 2005 by Asia Web Direct Co., Ltd.

2) Occupying position 6 is: Asian Institute of Technology. This site is about advanced education in engineering and science. They do, not too unreasonably, have a web mail link which obviously deserves a high position to compete with the web designers here.

3) Occupying position 7 is: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development with a title "HTTP Error 404". This is the most ludicrous of them all as "Le serveur Web ne parvient pas a trouver le fichier ou le script demande. Varifiez l'URL pour vous assurer que le chemin d'es est correct, ou bien allez" definately has a certain ring to it when searching for an English-speaking web designer in the metropolis.

4) Occupying position 8 is: The Peninsula Bangkok.This is one of Bangkok's premier hotels and nowhere on the home page is there even the mention of the word "web". The hotel does, however, have a wave-shaped design and therefore should be positioned along with the city's web designers.

5) Finally, occupying position 9 is: Conference on Trade and Development. Here, they have not indexed the title of the page but have seen fit to index "Free Website Stats and Website counter by WebSTAT".

Where exactly in Bangkok has the municipality created the Free Website Stats district? In the French quarter, I suspect. Also, try "website design asia" if you're looking to bring your designs to the 2006 Asian Automation Conference or, if you're hard up for cash, the American Red Cross, occupying positions 1-2.