Wow! I just googled "talk radio"

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MeekAndMild

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There were 204,000,000 hits for the search string 'talk radio'.

How do you suppose Air America came up number one out of 204 million? Is that a lucky chance or what? :rolleyes:

You'd expect Larry King to come up number one since he's been doing it for 40 years or maybe Rush since he's so controversial and well syndicated, but Air America? Hogwash!
 
Well now... Doesn't Google go by site popularity? I thought it did... It sorta makes sence, because from what I've seen alot more dems seem to be 'wired' as opposed to republicans/others... That's just a personal observation though.
 
A perfect example of why I have stopped using Google as my search engine. I have noticed that thier search results sure seem to come back heavy on commercial sites. Money talks, and apparently it buys better search returns as well. Or AA's webcoders really have a godlike grasp on the Meta tag thing!
 
money talks

of course money talks, how do you think google makes it's money? you pay for top listing. air america is well financed, although not well received.
 
You know, I still wonder if it's the money or not... If it were the money, wouldn't Air America be at the top of the "Sponsored Links" column, as opposed to the search results?

Wolfe.
 
from Google

Results 1 - 10 of about 4,110,000 for rush limbaugh. (0.10 seconds)

Results 1 - 10 of about 153,000,000 for air america. (0.09 seconds)


I dont listen to either one........

You know if we took all the talking heads to New Orleans, maybe all that hot air could dry up the floodwaters...lol
 
People employ a method known as "Google bombing". You set up many web sites linking the words you want to a specific site. The liberals were very successful at this by collaborating on their effort to discredit the President.

If you google "miserable failure", the first item is the White House's bio on George W. Bush. The conservatives countered with their own bomb. If you google "great president", the same White House bio page comes up. Also, if you do "waffles", you will see the official John Kerry site.

Being first on google doesn't mean as much now because of such internet hooliganism.
 
I have a buddy who sells deer feeders. He pays a fee to get listed higher on google (on the right hand side - advertisements.) I only assume it is the same on search results on the left hand side.

There are several specialized search engines, but I never use them (default to google.) I do like Mozilla for my browser. Seems to reduce pop ups to almost 0.
 
About Google

Well, Google doesn't publish their algorithm for sifting through search results (it's not a trivial task, and if they published their algorithm, they wouldn't be #1 anymore).

When you do a Google search, results can come up in one of three areas:
1. Main search results (returned by main algorithm)
2. Sponsored links (right side)
3. Sponsored links (top)

The sponsored links are made available by paid advertisers, and are put up there by a separate algorithm that first requires matching keywords, and then for matches, uses a combination of advertising bids (think auction) and pure randomness.

As far as the main search results, there is no way to pay Google to get your page(s) to come up there. They use an algorithm (computer recipe) which, among other things, apparently counts links to the page from other pages on the web - more links = more important = higher position in search results. There is more to it than that, but that's part of it.

If you think about it, it wouldn't be smart for Google to purposely use methods that cause undesirable information to appear when people do a search - if they did that, then people wouldn't use their search engine, and there'd be no more visits, and no more advertising revenue. One thing those guys are not, is stupid.

It's another matter that the rest of the world is trying to game the system, and figure out *how* to get their web content to come up higher in the Google search list. It's in Google's interest to defeat artificially high results in their algorithm. It's in publisher's interest to try to learn the algorithm and do their best to beat it - there is some IT competition going on there.
 
Try making "Air America" a quoted string.

Drops the results to around Rush's level (4,400,000).

The same thing on Teoma (going from non-quoted to quoted string) drops 20 million to 388K.

Simple trick: name your network something like "News Radio" and you'll get a pile of generic hits not intended for the brand. Not likely Rush's numbers are getting plumped up by airamerica paintball or airamerica.org air travel, either.


Edited to add: for those wondering about alternatives: I've been having pretty good results from Teoma.
 
The hits on Air America might have something to do with the proclivity of people to want to look at car wrecks and dead people. :p
 
As far as the main search results, there is no way to pay Google to get your page(s) to come up there. They use an algorithm (computer recipe) which, among other things, apparently counts links to the page from other pages on the web - more links = more important = higher position in search results. There is more to it than that, but that's part of it.
Click to expand...

Bingo. The more links to your page, the more higher you get. This leads to circular linking, which people just set up pages with nothing but links to other pages to improve their position.
 
for the most part google searches are just fine. There are a few topics where people have managed to get their site to the top by the methods mentioned before, but when you really look at it, those sites are the exception. I usually use search engines to find random information, or to find a specific website that I cant quite remember the exact address... and for those purposes, google works just fine.

Any search engine can be exploited, but of all the ones I've used, google is my favorite.
 
Google Information for Webmasters

From:
http://www.google.com/intl/en/webmasters/4.html

Google Information for Webmasters

I'm puzzled by my site's ranking.
1. How Google ranks pages.

Google's order of results is automatically determined by more than 100 factors, including our PageRank algorithm. Please check out our Technology Overview page for more details. Due to the nature of our business and our interest in protecting the integrity of our search results, we limit the information we make available to the public about our ranking system.

2. My page's location in the search results keeps changing.

Each time we update our database of webpages, our index invariably shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and sites' ranking may change. Your rank naturally will be affected by changes in the ranking of other sites. No one at Google hand adjusts the results to boost the ranking of a site. The order of Google's search results is automatically determined by many factors, including our PageRank algorithm, and is described in more detail here.

You might check to see if the number of other sites that link to your URL has decreased. This is the single biggest factor in determining which sites are indexed by Google, as we find most pages when our robots crawl the web, jumping from page to page via hyperlinks. To find a sampling of sites that link to yours, try a Google link search.

3. My pages don't return for certain keywords.

Google does not manually assign keywords to sites, nor do we manually "boost" the rankings of any site. The ranking process is completely automated and takes into account more than 100 factors to determine the relevance of each result.

If you'd like your site to return for particular keywords, include these words on your pages. Our crawler analyzes the content of webpages in our index to determine the search queries for which they're most relevant. If your site clearly and accurately describes your topic and many other websites link to yours, it'll likely return as a search result for your desired keywords.

If you feel that certain keywords are essential to your site's success, you may want to consider our targeted keyword advertising program. Google does not sell placement in our results, but we do offer advertising adjacent to them. Please note that advertising with Google neither helps nor hurts your site's ranking in our search results.
Click to expand...

See also Technology Overview:
http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html
 
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