Week 4 Tute Blog 2

How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?

• Its relevance to the words and concepts in the query
• Its overall link popularity
• Advertisers/sponsors given higher priority/rank

Who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?

• "Because of the potentially large number of pages that can be retrieved by a search, good relevancy ranking is important. Most search engines use various criteria to construct a relevancy rating of each hit and will present your search results in this order. First generation search engines primarily use term relevancy ranking. This type of ranking judges relevancy based on the presence of your search terms in Web documents. For example, ranking will be based on: the presence of search terms in the title, URL, first heading; the number of times search terms appear in the document; search terms appearing early in the document; search terms appearing close together; etc. This is known as "on the page" ranking, since the engine looks at content on the page to determine its relevancy. " ( http://www.internettutorials.net/eng.html)

What are some of your favourite search engines? why do you like one more than others?

• Meta search engines eg. Dogpile save time combining individual engines and bringing up a wider variety of results in the one place, with the one search. It also has yellow and white pages search options, allowing a wider, easier and more efficient search.
• I also like the layout and simplicity of Google- it is efficient returning search results and I like the option to search Australian pages only as this often has a higher relevance to what I am searching for.