Hi,

Not sure if this is the right forum for this, but when one does a google search you get hundreds of hits for your search. My question is how do the ones that first come up get into that posistion? Dumb question, yes, but my professor wants us to find out so, any info on this would be great.

one would think that it would be based on a scientific searching method, and for a lot of searches this is true, however for a number of popular searches like "computers" "cars" "vacations" etc, companies pay google a great deal of money to get a healthy bump up, evidenced by the fact that a lot of google searches are biasted towards commercial companies.

Absolutely, pay commercial company appears on top of others. For the "scientific searching method", most recently/frequently searched result will be on top of the others. This is how google's do when you search: First the google regional server farm will look up the query from its cache, if it is not already there then the other regional server farm will be asked to return the result. That means before you start a "search", the search result is already there. And the "search queries" will be update whenever the server farm is idle. Therefore, most of the time the search process will be done within 3 seconds for the backend.

Google also relies heavily on the amount of indexed links that point to your site. For example, larger sites that have been linked by other sites zillions of times get better rankings.

Also, how relavent the information is (simliar words & phrases to your search, number of times the words appear) probably play a good role as well. There are many, many factors involved.

Even with sites paying for their sites to return in the top 10 or whatever though you can't argue too much with google, they started out as nothing, and have become the greatest ever. Right now google is the best, no matter how they do buisness they are the best, they may not be in the future, but right now they are.

http://www.google.com/technology/index.html

Google can only index 'static' web pages, so much of the web goes unnoticed to its search engine.

thanks all who gave some info on this subject

What are you talking about? If that were true then why do the very dynamic threads here at TS consistently show up in top ten search queries?

All too true. There may be validity to what NIC said, but it is likely not the whole truth. Plenty of pages involving CGI, PL and PHP get index by Google.

maybe Nic is also talking about things like searching for periodicals in online databases (something like infotrac) that do not show up on google. i had to do that for a research project and google did not even have any of my sources. then again, it costs money to sign up and search in those databases.

I think there is also a bribery factor going on her. You pay say $1,000.00 and they keep you site near the top. I bet there are some instances of preferred treatment. When you make up your webpage you also put certain things in the header for keywords and that gets you toward the top of the list also. The more keywords you have the people can find you.

Quite true. I guess an article I recently read had its facts wrong (my excuse). Here is a quote from google's own website ...

Reasons your site may not be included