OT - How do search engines work?

("Martin Hotze" wrote)
BTW, what does SCNR stand for? :-)

I will use google before asking dumb questions *bg* ... but:
http://www.acronymfinder.com/
http://www.acronymfinder.com/af-quer...t&Acronym=SCNR

SCNR = Sorry, Could Not Resist


Ok. Next post, *you* get to be the straight man :-)

It's all about ....


timing.

--
Montblack
http://lumma.de/mt/archives/bart.gif

In article q%qxb.325424$Tr4.999278@attbi_s03,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:

Edward,

Jay .... go to this page:

I went where you suggested, and found this in the "fine print":

*****
2.4 The current fee for Yahoo! Express for initial consideration in the
Directory is a NON-REFUNDABLE fee of US $299.00 applicable for each web site
submitted that does not include adult content and/or services. You
acknowledge that the payment of this fee is for consideration of your site
AND DOES NOT IN ANY WAY GUARANTEE THAT YOUR SITE WILL BE INCLUDED IN THE
DIRECTORY. Your payment only guarantees that Yahoo! will consider and
respond to your request within seven business days, by either accepting or
not accepting your site
*****

What kind of fool would agree to pay Yahoo, when this is all they offer?


Any commercial site wanting to get in will pay.

Yes the fine print seems scary, but it is there so they can refuse porn
sites and "how to make a bomb" type sites.

It is a "yearly" fee ... so you know they want you in, and hope that you
will renew every year. I have developed many sites and none have ever
been refused by Yahoo. They want the cash.

Edward

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!

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?

Possibly because the word "Hotels" doesn't appear on your page. I bet the
word "Hotel" does though.
Didn't try it out though.
Paul

"Jay Honeck" writes:

When I type in "Iowa City Airport" at the Yahoo search screen, our "History
of the Iowa City Airport" webpage pops up second on the list -- which is all
well and fine.

When I type in "Iowa City Hotels" at the Yahoo search screen, however, our
hotel website doesn't appear at all. Well, maybe it's five pages in, but
who's going to bother to look there?

I've studied meta tags, and key words, and I believe I've got things set up
properly for the "robots" to see -- yet the stupid "Weather Underground" and
"Sheraton" sites pops up ahead of our hotel. (And they don't even appear to
be using meta tags...)

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Google is the only search engine that particularly matters, but much
of what I say applies to most search engines anyway. (And Yahoo may
be using google search actually?)

Well. First of all, you're competing with a lot of other hotels in
Iowa city. This is going to make it difficult to get really top
placement for the generic search -- probably essentially impossible.

One thing you can improve is that you don't have any headings marked
on the page -- no h1, h2, etc. tags. Your big title is just
decorated text, not an actual heading. That should help. Words in
headings generally get extra weight.

I see you've already included it in the title, which is good (and I
don't remember seeing it there before).

Google page-rank really likes sites with links to them. You've got
lots of content on your site, which ought to get a lot of people to
link to you; but specifically asking for links from some places can
help. Local historical society? Other fans of the Iowa City airport,
of course. You seem to have 31 links already, which is good.

I dug into the Yahoo results from (and the first page seems to have
identical content to Google, suggesting that it really is google under
the hood still). You're mentioned in a link from a uiowa page on page
3 of the results, and don't seem to turn up in the first *15* pages of
results. That's seriously nasty.

Unlike many of the sites I've worked on, you may be a good candidate
for google ad-words -- buying some of those little ads on the right in
the results. You can play with it pretty cheaply, and set maximums,
and such.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: noguns-nomoney.com www.dd-b.net/carry/
Photos: dd-b.lighthunters.net Snapshots: www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: dragaera.info/

Icebound writes:

Paul Tomblin wrote:
In a previous article, "Jay Honeck" said:

When I type in "Iowa City Airport" at the Yahoo search screen, our "History
of the Iowa City Airport" webpage pops up second on the list -- which is all
well and fine.

Google uses a secret "Page Rank" technology that is mostly based on
how
many sites link to yours. If people like your site enough to link to it a
lot, Google will rank it higher. Unfortunately there are people out there
who cheat, or "game the system" if you want to be charitable about it.
What they do is put up thousands of web pages that consist of nothing but
links to their customers, in order to improve their customers "Page Rank".
Google is in a constant battle to find the cheaters and eliminate the
artificial boost they give to their customer's Page Rank, though, so
paying these people is ****ing your money away. Far better would be to
get your friends on this newsgroup to put a link to your site on their
personal pages or blogs.

And they'll sometimes retalliate pretty massively if they really get
peeved -- like block all listing of a site. It's best *not* to try
for quick-fix rules-lawyer solutions to this problem.

about
Google is probably true of Yahoo. But since Google is the only search
engine that matters, I wouldn't worry about Yahoo if they're not using
Google.

It must be a pretty exotic algorithm.

In google, when you try "Suites start at" (phrase from the home page),
plus "Alexis", you get 2 hits to a hotel in Seattle, but nothing else.

That's a bizarre result (which I reproduced; it really does happen).
I'm afraid Jay may be getting bitten by Frontpage; the way that
"suites start" banner is put in may not be a way google parses and
understands (although I find alt text on an image saying that, and
google *is* supposed to pick that up).

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

No. I've gotten lots of pages listed that aren't linked to. But they
don't rank as high as pages on similar topics that *are* linked to.
It's also somewhat at the site level, rather than the page level,
sort-of. I mean, it's secret, so we're all kinda guessing, based on
what we've seen over the years. And it may have changed a few times,
just to confuse things.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: noguns-nomoney.com www.dd-b.net/carry/
Photos: dd-b.lighthunters.net Snapshots: www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: dragaera.info/

"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.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: noguns-nomoney.com www.dd-b.net/carry/
Photos: dd-b.lighthunters.net Snapshots: www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: dragaera.info/

Hamish Reid writes:

Most search engines I use ignore meta tags; Google certainly does.

They say otherwise on their webmaster guidelines page, and my
experience has been that they do index meta tags.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: noguns-nomoney.com www.dd-b.net/carry/
Photos: dd-b.lighthunters.net Snapshots: www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: dragaera.info/

Edward Todd writes:

"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:EC2xb.313373$Fm2.328957@attbi_s04...
When I type in "Iowa City Airport" at the Yahoo search screen, our


Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?
--


Jay .... go to this page:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Regional/U_S__S...City/Travel_an
d_Transportation/

At the top right you will see a link "Suggest A Site".

Click it and have your credit card ready. Yahoo and Google are like the
yellow pages. Want to play ... have to pay.

Google search does *not* *ever* accept money for search placement.
It's against their most basic, rock-bottom, policy. See item 1 in
"google facts and fiction"
http://www.google.com/webmasters/facts.html.
--
David Dyer-Bennet, , www.dd-b.net/dd-b/
RKBA: noguns-nomoney.com www.dd-b.net/carry/
Photos: dd-b.lighthunters.net Snapshots: www.dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/
Dragaera/Steven Brust: dragaera.info/

Jay Honeck wrote:

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Check out http://philip.greenspun.com/panda

George Patterson
Some people think they hear a call to the priesthood when what they really
hear is a tiny voice whispering "It's indoor work with no heavy lifting".

Icebound wrote:

In google, when you try "Suites start at" (phrase from the home page),
plus "Alexis", you get 2 hits to a hotel in Seattle, but nothing else.

Most search engines ignore banner text. If "suites start at" were in plain text
on Jay's site, some of the web crawlers would pick it up in a week or two.

George Patterson
Some people think they hear a call to the priesthood when what they really
hear is a tiny voice whispering "It's indoor work with no heavy lifting".