When searching in Yahoo or Google what governs the search? What determines whether a site will be recognized?

Answer 1

Google uses a complicated system of weighted websites pointing to you.

Example. You have a website A, your friend has a link to your website your score is now 1. CNN has decided your article on blahblah is very good and has a link on their website linking to you. Your score is now 231. Your friend is not that important so your score barely went up, but CNN is important so your score went up a lot. Google adds up all the scores and gives a score based on every website. That is the simple explanation.

Yahoo! I think uses a system similar to Google with a bit of massaging. Yahoo! used to use Google in that they hired Google for their searching. For 2 years people using Yahoo! search was actually using Google search and didn't even know it. Yahoo! at the time owned about 15% of Google and had a chance to buy Google for a cheap 1 billion, but didn't (hahahaha ooooops). Yahoo! decided this was not a good idea and went back to the search game and I think sold off its Google stake. They have an algorithm similar to Google's but I believe the put more emphasis on the tags of the website as well as links pointing.

Answer 2

Every site has their own way of indexing sites. They use a combination of keywords in the "meta" fields and text in the page. The ranking is based on how many links to a site there are from other sites. You can also pay to have your page listed high under various search terms.

Answer 3

Yahoo!'s "crawler" *tends* to search (or at least favor) by title, and Google by page contents. Yes, you can pay various services to get your website promoted and pushed.

You can "buy in" to Google's Adwords. The way that works is, your ads show up on adspace which in turn is shown on folks who allow, through a Google program called Adsense. Those who allow space through Adsense, get paid when someone clicks out of their website to someone's website who paid for it through Adwords. (Google takes a cut, of course.) It's a trading mart for clicks.

To "optimize" your website, in general, for Google-type searches (not just Adwords) see the example listed on pages 374-375 of the book Google Hacks. (I don't know if there are similar methods for Yahoo! optimization...)

P.S. A "crawler" is a search engine's software that periodically goes out and samples all websites, everywhere, everywhere, so's it can return results when someone types in search keywords...