search engines

• How do search engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?
  Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the WWW itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link it sees. The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags).

• 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?
  When a user enters a query into a search engine (typically by using key words), the engine examines its index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria, usually with a short summary containing the document's title and sometimes parts of the text. Most search engines support the use of the boolean operators AND, OR and NOT to further specify the search query. Some search engines provide an advanced feature called proximity search which allows users to define the distance between keywords.

• what are some of your favourite search engines? why do you like one more than others?
  ask.com, dogpile.com, blackle.com, but usually just google.com I don't really have a preference I don't usually need overly comprehensive internet searches so the formats of the engines don't particularly bother me.