Go to Google and search for the term cool games. Then look the blue bar below the Google logo, and you see something like this:

Results 1 - 10 of about 194,000,000 for cool games

This means Google has found over 16M pages that contain these three words. Yet somehow it has managed to rank the pages. It’s decided that one particular page should appear first, then another, then another, and so on, all the way down to page 16,300,000. (By the way, this has to be one of the wonders of the modern world: The search engines have tens of thousands of computers, evaluating 10 or 20 billion pages, and returning the information in a fraction of a second.)

How on earth does Google do it? How does it evaluate and compare pages? How do other search engines do the same? Well, I don't know exactly. The search engines don't want you to know how they work (or it would be too easy to create pages that exactly match the search system, "giving them what they want to see"). But I can explain the general concept.tinue to use these outdated.

When Google searches for your search term, it begins by looking for pages containing the exact phrase. Then it starts looking for pages containing the words close together. Then it looks for pages that have the pages scattered around. This isn’t necessarily the order in which a search engine shows you pages; in some cases, pages with words close together (but not the exact phrase) appear higher than pages with the exact phrase, for instance. That’s because search engines evaluate pages according to a variety of criteria.

The search engines look at many factors. They look for the words throughout the page, both in the visible page and in the HTML source code for the page. Each time they find the words, they are weighted in some way. A word in one position is “worth” more than a word in another position. A word formatted in one way is “worth” more than a word formatted in another.

- Of the visits that don’t originate at a search engine, a large proportion are revisits — people who know exactly where they want to go. This isn’t new business; it’s repeat business. Most new visits come through the search engines — that is, search engines are the single most important source of new visitors to Web sites.