OT - How do search engines work?

Jay Honeck wrote:

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"!

Are you literally typing in "Iowa City Hotels", complete with quotes? Are you
typing in Iowa City Hotels with no quotes? The first will get you a listing of
only those sites that have something very close to "Iowa City Hotels" somewhere
on the site; you're searching for the string. The second would get you a listing
of sites that have the word Iowa, the word City, or the word Hotels. The more
of these words they have, the higher in the list they are. If you type in +Iowa
+City +Hotels, you'll get a list of all web pages that have all three words on
the page.

None of these is likely to be what you want. No search engine is going to do
what I think you want.

If I want to find hotels in a city, I will either use the Yahoo menus to get a
list of hotels in that city, or I will use the Maps feature of Yahoo to get a
map of the town and pick out hotels from the "nearest business" feature menus.

George Patterson
A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something that can
be learned no other way.