OT - How do search engines work?

"Jay Honeck" writes:

Does that mean that if nobody links to you, you may never even show up
in an search-list??

Possibly. Or possibly Google's imperfect algorithms decided that Alexis
Park was page spamming. Alexis Park is definitely indexed by Google - if
you type "Alexis Park" it shows up second, after another Alexis Park
resort in Las Vegas. Strangely enough, typing "Alexis luxury suites" gets
the AirNav listing of Alexis Park as the 6th hit, but the next relevant
link (ie not to the one in Las Vegas) is on the 4th page there is a Yahoo
Travel page.

So how does "Underground Weather" manage to come up "Numero Uno" on a search
for "Iowa City Hotels"? They CERTAINLY aren't a hotel, and they CERTAINLY
aren't in Iowa City!

Weather underground has a *bazillion* (that's a very large number)
incoming links, because of people (like me) who use their weather
forecast image on their pages. Thus an immense page-rank, I'd guess.

Frankly I think google ought to find and compensate for that sort of
situation, not to punish Weather Underground, who are not doing
anything wrong, but simply because that particular mode of operation
gives immense link counts that misrepresent the general relevance of
the stie. They should rank high on *weather* searches, but not on
*every* search.

This whole thing is so stupid. 95+% of the hotels located in Iowa City are
NOT coming up when you type in "Iowa City Hotels"! What kind of a stupid
search engine would exclude the ONLY websites that matter to the person
searching for a hotel?

A search engine that doesn't actually understand English, and is
simply using some rules about matching occurrences of words.

In general search engines are better at finding rare and unusual
things than they are at finding common, widespread things. The word
"hotel" occurs in the web page of ever conference, for example, and in
lots of fiction, and in all sorts of other places.
--
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