How ranking works
Finally before presentation of the resulting websites, ranking occurs. Ranking is the process by which a search engine orders the results of a search. You would hope that ranking presents the websites most likely to have the most useful information first.
However you should be aware that in some cases, commercial sites can buy a place near the top of a list of websites in a search engine's results. The implications of this are that the "best" sites do not necessarily appear at the top of the list. Also the results may appear in a different order at a different date due to ranking changes
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A useful exercise is to look at the information pages of search engines to understand how they work. There is usually a section on how to notify the search engine about your website which will have interesting clues as to how the search engine treats new websites. For each of:
look for the "about" pages and find out how the engine works and how you submit a website to it. |
It is important to remember that a search carried out by a particular search engine will return only a sub-set of all the possible results. This is because, due to practical constraints, the engine cannot index all the pages available in the web. An issue here is also how quickly the engine reacts to new or altered web pages. Thus it is always worth using several different search engines for any particular reference enquiry. Of course, there are sites returned in a search, which when clicked upon do not appear at all because the website has been rearranged or removed since the last indexing.
That brings us to the end of this section. You can review any topic by using the menu at the left-hand side of the screen, or you can move on to the next topic:Ownership of the web ...
