How Google works

[francis]

It's just such a great idea (http://www.google.com/technology/pigeonrank.html). Not sure about the cleaning up after them, though

[Tom]

Interesting? Very. Witty? Yes. But following B F Skinner's principle? No. Skinner's theory rested on 'positive re-inforcement'. You give the pigeon something to eat each time it does what you want. Anything like this would destroy Google's results.

[Stephen Bawa]

Amidst the side splitting humour of Francis' link, one question lingers in my mind: How does Google's rating system work?

[Tom]

All search engines work much the same way. See Ongoing (http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/07/30/OnSearchTOC). Google's great invention was a vast equation which qualifed the raw search results with measures relating to link popularity. Its really important to understand this if working for an organisation which cares about its search engine rankings - by which I mean most website providers.