SECTION 3: USING SEARCH ENGINES EFFECTIVELY

HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES RANK RESULTS?

LOCATION OF THE SEARCH TERM is one way that search engines rank results.

• Title words are assumed to be most relevant, so search engines look in the titles of Web pages.

• Search terms or words appearing near the top of the Web page are assumed to be relevant, so search engines look for your words near the top of the page. Most search engines assume that any Web site or page relevant to the search term/phrase will mention the words right at the beginning.

Let's take a look at some search results so that we can better understand how search engines display results.

Below are examples from Google® and Yahoo!®.

Click here if you want to open a new browser window to Google® (http://www.google.com) or Yahoo!® (http://dir.yahoo.com/). You can also do a "Bookmark" in Netscape® or add the search engines to your "Favorites" in Internet Explorer® if you want to go back to them later.

We were looking for clinical trails for AZT users, so we searched for "azt and clinical trials".

Notice on the screen below that Yahoo!® ranks results, listing them as 1, 2, 3, and so on:

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