OT - How do search engines work?

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.
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