Questions about the internet.

Q: How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?
A: Google ranks websites by how often other sites link to you. Google also uses the relevance of your website to make sure that it is to be included in the list of websites it gives you. The rankings of websites on search engines used to be based on the relevance of your website along with the amount of content on it. So after not to long web designers would put large areas of white text with white background. This would create an illusion to the search engine that there was far more content on the web site than there actually was. Google's way of ranking websites got rid of this and has made Google very popular and effective.

Q: Who, or what, makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?
A: In my opinion I feel that a page's usefulness is based on the source and the amount of material listed. If the source is not good (Wikipedia) then I feel that the page or site is useless. Wikipedia uses information that can be entered by or edited by anyone that feels like they know about the subject. There is a lot of useful factual information Wikipedia but the fact that it can be edited by anyone makes the site, to me, lose it's credibility.
To get to the top of the search engines the page has to be popular among other websites. The more websites that link to it, the higher the ranking will be on the search engine.


Q: What are some of your favorite search engines? Why do you like one more than others?
A: I like Google the most out of any search engine. It has evolved to be tailored to what you need and what you are looking for. It has added separate sections for images, web, maps, and so on. I like it more than others mostly because of habit. It's what I've used for as long as I can remember so as of now it's kind of a natural instinct to go to Google when I need to search for something.