Will Google use non-link references as a signal?

This question comes from Boston, EA; Eric Enge asks “Do you think web search will ever make use of references (web site mentions that are not links) as a ranking signal?

So there are two answers. The first one is, I never want to take a ranking signal off the table like, I’ve joked, that if the face of the moon can help us rank the search results better, I’m willing to use the face of the moon. At the same time think about how people would attack the use of references. Right now a lot of people rely on getting links, if all they have to do is example.com in text and then you can leave as comments all over the web and all over blogs and all over forums it will almost be anywhere you can stamp any user generated content people would be leaving those references. So that’s the sort of reason why you might be skeptical about why we’d use this sort of signal, because people could abuse that sort of thing they could just leave mentions of the URLs even if they can’t generate links. But I’ll say we are willing to look at it, we would run the analysis we would say is there a way to pull out that signal from that noisy data where we could find a way to improve it. But that would definitely be a sort of thing that people would try to abuse it.

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