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.
--
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/

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".

Jay Honeck wrote:

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

My education in this matter is not as good as that of others, but one problem
you have is that Yahoo isn't a pure "web-crawler" type search engine. You need
to register your main site with them. That will get it in the database.

Some search engines build databases by using "web-crawling" tools. These visit
as many web sites as they can find. Some of them search the meta tags and titles
for keywords, and a few search the main text. You've done everything you can to
get into those databases.

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

In article EC2xb.313373$Fm2.328957@attbi_s04,
"Jay Honeck" wrote:

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?

Ditto with the same search strings on Google...

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...)

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

Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong?

Depends on whether you want to concentrate on Yahoo or something like
Google, which is a more free-range search engine (I much prefer Google).
Google, for example, doesn't take any notice of meta tags, and your
ranking is almost entirely dependent on how many sites link to your
site; Yahoo uses a combination of paid ranking and other more murky ways
to list you. It's a black art in my experience, and with most of them
the only sure way to influence listings is with money...

Hamish (affiliated in a small way with www.googleguide.com)

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/

There is only one airport and few related sites. There are hunderds of
'hotel guides' with which you are competing for top positioning. If
there was a guarenteed way to get the top spot, everyone would do it,
and of course it would be impossible for everyone to be there. As
others have said, Google does not use meta tags, but instead some of
their own magic having to do with how many are linked to you. You
might find some info at http://searchenginewatch.com/
--
Gene Seibel
Hangar 131 - http://pad39a.com/gene/plane.html
Because I fly, I envy no one.


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?

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 rules. Google is God. All else is a pale imitation of Google.

Google works this way: the more sites link to yours, the higher your
rating is. The higher a site's rating is, the more credit you get for
its being linked to you.

This works far better than even the guy who dreamed it up could have
hoped or expected or dreamed. It works wonderfully well. It is Adam
Smith's Invisible Hand turned loose on information.

If you don't have a Google tool-bar installed on your browser, your
life is slower, more complicated, and less rewarding than it might
otherwise be.

Besides, Google has the simplest, most elegant home page on the web.
It consists of 38 words. Go look: www.google.com


all the best -- Dan Ford
email: (put CUB in subject line)

see the Warbird's Forum at www.warbirdforum.com
and the Piper Cub Forum at www.pipercubforum.com

Besides, Google has the simplest, most elegant home page on the web.
It consists of 38 words. Go look: www.google.com

True, but I like having Yahoo as my home page, because of their
up-to-the-minute news coverage.

A throw-back to my newspaper days, I guess. I knew I'd have to add
newspapers to our order when I saw a big story hit in Yahoo!
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"

Jay then make news.google.com your home page or keep Yahoo and get the
Google tool bar.


"Jay Honeck" wrote in message
news:R59xb.117245$Dw6.540124@attbi_s02...
Besides, Google has the simplest, most elegant home page on the web.
It consists of 38 words. Go look: www.google.com

True, but I like having Yahoo as my home page, because of their
up-to-the-minute news coverage.

A throw-back to my newspaper days, I guess. I knew I'd have to add
newspapers to our order when I saw a big story hit in Yahoo!
--
Jay Honeck
Iowa City, IA
Pathfinder N56993
www.AlexisParkInn.com
"Your Aviation Destination"