Week 4: Part 2!

The way search engines rank web pages when they are being searched by user is by following a certain algorithm. The first and foremost rule is searching for pages with the keywords in the HTML title tag. These pages are often assumed to be more relevant to others in the topic. Search engines also search if the keywords appear at the top of the web page such as in the headline or subheadings. Frequency is the next biggest factor for search engines. A search engine will analyze how often keywords on a page appear relevant to the other words. The higher the frequency the more relevant the search engine deems that web page.

Search engines also analyze how pages link together and can determine what pages are about and how important they are deemed to be and whether the page deserves a ranking boost or not. Another factor is clickthrough measurement. The search engine watches users and the results they select from a search and eventually change the ranking and importance of different pages depending on the clickthrough measurement results.

My overall favorite search engine would have to be Google. I choose this search engine because its so simple and user friendly and almost always gives me the best results. It also has a few good features such as the dictionary, calculator, language converter and currency converter. My next favorite search engine would be msn as it again achieves good results and is user friendly.