I never knew that when I Google'd or Yahoo'd....

Master of Search Engine Anatomy

How does it help in developing info lit with colleagues and students?

At first glance, search engines seem to be very complex.  After completing the readings about their many parts it supported my belief that these engines are very complicated.  However, the information provided about the search engine’s many parts helped me realize how they work in sorting, organizing and ranking websites.  With this knowledge I am now able to understand why only certain websites show up on internet searches.  Furthermore, based on this information students can be taught how to select resources by carefully defining their own criteria.  This would be a valuable lesson which would benefit students in any future research projects.

How Engines Determine Relevancy Ranking

I chose to investigate how Google and Yahoo search engines rank websites.

Google’s search engine is based on four criteria.  First and foremost is relevance.  The engine determines whether the content is relevant to the topic that was searched.  The second criterion is comprehensiveness of the website.  If the site is vague and does not go into detail it is ranked lower in the list of results.  The third criterion is whether a website is fresh and new.  The engine ranks those websites with new content higher than those which have content that has been available for longer.  The fourth criterion is with regards to how fast the engine can examine the website.  Any site that takes too long to examine for relevancy is ranked lower in the search results.

Yahoo’s search engine has slightly different search criteria.  Yahoo’s criterion is based on the coding of a website.  Higher rankings are given to those sites which are entirely in HTML code.  Another criterion of Yahoo is the originality of the content.  Similar to Google, if a website has new content it will be ranked higher.  The amount and quality of hyperlinks in each website also affect the ranking of websites.  The more relevant hyperlinks an article has the better it is ranked.  Finally, if the metadata of a website is more descriptive of what is in the website it affects the ranking.  The more the metadata can tell the engine about the site, the more accurate the results of the search.

I found the task of investigating how Google and Yahoo search engines operate to be very interesting.  Even after getting an idea of how they work, I am still amazed at how this type of technology works.