How does Hilltop define affiliate sites?

*Affiliate sites are defined as follows –

    Pages that originate from the same domain (www.ibm.com, www.ibm.com/us/, products.ibm.com, solutions.ibm.com etc.) 
   
    Pages that originate from the same domains but with different top level and second level suffixes (like www.ibm.com, www.ibm.co.uk, www.ibm.co.jp etc.) 
   
    Pages that originate from neighborhood IPs (first 3 common octet in the IP number like 66.165.238.xxx is common) 
   
    Pages that originate from affiliate of affiliates (if www.abc.com is hosted on the same IP octet as www.ibm.com, then www.abc.com is an affiliate of www.ibm.co.uk even if they are on a different IP series) 

It is worth noting that the Hilltop algo bases its calculations only on ‘expert documents’. Its algo requires finding at least two expert documents voting for a page. If the algo does not find a minimum of two expert documents, the results returned are zero. Which essentially means, that the Hilltop algo fails to pass on any values to the rest of the ranking algo and therefore becomes ineffective for the search term query in question.

This is a very important aspect of the Hilltop algo – It is ineffective if sufficient expert documents are not located.

This unique feature of Hilltop algo, which has a high chance of returning a ‘zero’ score, based on highly specific query term, has led the majority of SEO community to believe that Google is using a ‘money words’ filter list. Actually, the ‘old Google’ results got displayed for specific search terms where Hilltop failed to produce effect. The collection of these terms is what the SEO community collected and called the ‘Money Words List’.

This effect also comes across as a strong evidence, indicating the deployment of Hilltop by Google. When Google introduced this new algo on November 15th, 2003, an analyst figured out that if you search for a query term added with some ‘exclusion’ trash characters, Google displayed the original (pre-algo-change) results, bypassing the so-called ‘money words’ filter list.

For example if you search for “real estate –hgfhjfgjhgjg –kjhkhkjhkjhk” then Google would attempt to show you the pages on “real estate” but excluding pages that contained the terms “hgfhjfgjhgjg” and “kjhkhkjhkjhk”. Since it is easy to understand that, there would hardly be any page containing the words “hgfhjfgjhgjg” and “kjhkhkjhkjhk”, Google should be returning the same results as one would get for the term ‘real estate’ alone. However that did not happen. Google showed results, which seemed to be identical to pre-algo-change ranking. In fact an anti-Google group setup a site (www.scroogle.org) to capture the differences in rankings to extract a so-called ‘money words’ filter list.