Gregg, I realize this is not worth your time, but how do articles of interest, adds, web pages, get their particular place or position on the web? When I look for something, I usually find hundreds of related data in numerical order. Is this done by paying for positions through the particular server, Yahoo, Google, etc...? Because I find several that are not promotions, just observations. It does not appear to have anything to do with the date of the material or accuracy. Who is going to look through thousands of references to find specific information? Besides some of us. If someone were to start a web page (domain?) on "strangelets", how would they promote their site? Is it all behind-the-scenes advertising? I picked strangelets for the hell of it. Also, using mills as an example, why don't their sites disappear along with the trash? And, if not their sites, how do the shills keep their crap flowing? Who pays the bill? Is there any oversight? I realize my terminology is probably way off. I just wonder why the servers don't have a date specific cut-off for useless, non-paying (I assume) adds or adds cloaked as statements. They need to flush the crap and make room for recent projects. All of this should be possible through programing. Is there a way to archive dated material and retrieve it when wanted? I imagine this is already done and I'm just too ignorant to figure it out. Can you ask for the most recent to the oldest? Hopefully, someone else is as lost and could benefit by your answer. I would guess that it has to do with being very specific in your query. But even with that, it narrowed my hunt by just a fraction. Apologize for using your time. I owe you. Thanks, Clay
I've asked Gregg some similar questions myself (and gotten very good answers) and I will not pretend to be able to answer in his stead. However, while you're waiting for him to log in you might visit this website: http://www.searchengines.com It may get you started. Jack
Part 1 of 3 Assume nothing. If you mean how to they get high rankings in a place like Google; and/or how, precisely, the whole Google thing works, then the web page to which Jack referred you contains some articles that, as you seem to have discovered, will get you on your way. Beyond that, for a straightforward explanation of what's going on at Google, I strongly recommend this easy-to-read-and-understand page. Thereafter, I recommend that you go directly to, and read, the following web pages: Creating Content Linking to Search Results Getting Listed Improving Your PageRank Advertising Your Website Generating Revenue by Running Ads where I believe pretty much all of your questions will be answered in one way or another. Google, Yahoo and most other good and reputable search engines let you list your site for free. Most of them also sell advertising so you can get your site listed higher in the rankings. Google does it the honorable way: How you rank in the main search results listings is purely a result of how well you crafted your pages so that they're "Google-friendly," and how well and often (but without breaking Google's rules) you submitted your site. Other factors like how many other web sites out there in the universe link to your site can also influence Google rankings. If you pay for Google advertising, it doesn't make your page show-up any higher in the main listings, but it will put your site over on the right, or across the top, in the paid listings area (this is called "Google AdWords"). By paying Google for yet another kind of advertising, you can make your site show-up, listed on other people's sites who display what's called "Google AdSense" advertising. See this page. But, again, it's all too much to discuss here. The pages to which I linked you, above, cover all this. Date is a factor in Google rankings, but not a determinate one. Accuracy plays no role whatsoever. What Google does, it does by automated means, with no human intervention. So no one is looking through thousands of references to find information. Now, that said, there is the Google Directory service, where someone actually does precisely that... though no one at Google. Google OEM's the DMOZ directory system, and it's DMOZ that recruits people to cull through the web's many pages and/or review and make decisions about submissions. DMOZ (or the Google Directory, which is nothing but DMOZ with Google's brand name on it) is completely human reviewed. It is not a search engine. It's a directory. There's a difference. A domain and a web page are two different things.l One first purchases one's domain name (my recommendation is to let me set up a direct account for you at eNom where I can give you $8.95/year domain name registration... a very low price when you consider that eNom, if it sold you that same domain name directly, would charge you $29.95/year). I'd feel bad about promoting my own domain registration service here, but at $8.95, by the time eNom gets its credit card fees, transaction costs, etc., I literally make only pennies. $8.95/year is, therefore, the price I give to friends, family, etc. It's essentially non-profit to me. So I feel no guilt. eNom (or whatever other domain registrar you choose) would be where you would register your domain name -- an annual thing that you have to renew each year... that is, unless you pay for more than one year, up to 10, at a time -- and then, after that, you would go sign-up for web hosting somewhere. I offer that, too, and, for friends, family, etc. -- which, as far as I'm concerned, includes all DI people -- I also have an essentially no-profit-for-me plan that will beat just about everyone else. I could sign you up for that, too, if you want; or you could go sign-up for hosting at literally any of thousands of hosting providers -- some reputable, many not -- out there. Anyway, once you've registered your domain, and chosen and paid for the first month of hosting at a hosting provider, then you develop your web site on your own computer and simply upload it to your hosting server using an FTP client. Or you could use a product like Microsoft Front Page to develop your web page and, if so, then you'd simply have your hosting provider "turn on Front Page extensions," and from that moment forward you could literally create your pages on FrontPage on your computer, then use Frontpage to upload them (just like an FTP client) to your hosting account; then, from that moment forward, you could use Frontpage to edit your pages not on your computer, but right on your hosting site. You could literally visit the site in your copy of Internet Explorer, then right-click on the page and select "Edit Page" from the menu that pops-up, and because your copy of FrontPage would know that the web site belongs to you, it would let you (and only you) edit and make changes to it (whereas others who right-click, etc. would be asked for logins and passwords and all kinda' other security stuff). It's actually fairly simple, once you understand it. For complete newbies, it can seem daunting, but it's really not that big of a deal... at least if all you want to do is get a credible, serviceable site up. Now, doing it well is another matter altogether. Everyone things they're some kinda' web site expert/guru/artist, etc. Most people are not... and it usually shows in the amateurish pages they build. But as it points out in my signature, I'm the master of digression... and I'm doing it now. So I'll stop. Nope! And that's as it should be. The Internet and its Worldwide Web is the most purely democratic place in the universe. I wouldn't change a thing. Now, of course, Google exercises at least some oversight over what appears on... Continued in next post...
Part 2 of 3 ...continued from previous post. ...its pages. As one or more of the articles to which I referred you, above, points out, spammers and others are always trying to cheat and get their pages to the top of the rankings for virtually every phrase conceivable. Google has an entire team fighting that. And there are other controls... some of which Google will not disclose to anyone. Trust me when I tell you that without them, Google would be unusable for all the spammer trash that would appear at the top of the rankings for nearly every phrase or word or word combination you can think of. I don't exactly know what you mean by "why don't their sites disappear along with the trash," but a site ranks wherever it ranks because of the factors described in the articles to which I refered you, above. They slide down the rankings only if other pages which appear based on the same search terms happen to be are more Google friendly and, therefore, rank higher. I also don't know exactly what you mean by "...how do the shills keep their crap flowing? But, as for the mills... The mills keep their crap flowing because, first, they have the money to hire web site developers who've read all the articles to which I referred you -- and many, many more -- and who know how to create pages that are very Google-friendly and, therefore, will rank highly in Google and other search engines when certain keywords or phrases are typed-in. They submit their pages often (but not too often) directly to Google, which makes the Google spiders to craw them again; and they change enough on each page just before each crawl that Google sees them as changed pages and, therefore, move them up the ranking... that's where the date thing, mentioned earlier, comes in. And, of course, the mills have the money to advertise their sites both at Google (using AdWords and AdSense, just to name two Google programs), and they advertise on "Get Your Degree!" web sites... some -- many, in fact -- of which are their own creation... which is but another reason that degree seekers wishing not to be ripped-off by the mills must be careful! But I digress again. It is. But if you're talking about Google -- the most democratic, fair-minded, all-services-available-to-everyone search engine out there -- then I say they're doing it just right. Well, Google already ranks most things in newest-to-oldest order, within the subset of general relevance. It sounds like you're just frustrated by the fact that when you type a search string into the Google search box, you get anywhere from hundreds to thousands or even millions of results, and few if any of them being exactly what you're looking for. The solution, however, is not to limit what Google indexes. On the contrary, the fact that Google, sooner or later, finds pretty much everything on the web -- no matter how obscure -- is its strength. The solution is to become extraordinarily skilled at crafting the search strings that you type-in to the Google search box so that all the garbage and detritis and crap that you don't want to see is not included in the search results. For example, in another thread here, someone asked for information about CS Lewis. There is a plethora of information about CS Lewis on the web, but if you want to get at it without also having to wade through tons and tons of irrelevant crap, then you'd better know how to craft a search string to plug into the Google search box that will narrow-down the search for you to only the most relevant stuff... to really target your search to only that which will get you what you want. If one just types "CS Lewis" (without the quotation marks) into the Google search box and presses the [Enter] key on their keyboard, they get 8,980,00 results. And, worse, the results will quickly degrade, as you look down the list, to web pages that contain the text string "cs" and "lewis," but not necessarily together; and then they will degrade further to pages which have either "cs" or "lewis," but not both, etc. That's why nearly 9 million search results show-up. Easily two-thirds of them are probably completely irrelevant. But that's not Google's fault. That's our fault for not giving Google more to work with. If ever there were a time that the old saying, "Garbage in, garbage out!" were applicable, this would be it. But if we simply put quotation marks around "CS Lewis" in the Google search box, then we're telling Google to only show us pages which contain that precise text string (regardless of capitalization, you should know). Suddenly our 8,980,000 results shrinks to 3,030,000... a two-thirds decrease... or so it is at this writing. And the best of them will almost certainly be among the first five to 10 pages of search results (though, when I'm really digging for something, I've been known to plumb the depths to as many as the 50th page of Google search results... or even deeper). But we have to be careful about being too specific in our search string, or we'll deprive ourselves of pages we might have liked to have seen. For example, our "CS Lewis" search string will return all pages with "CS Lewis" anywhere on them, but what about pages where CS Lewis is spelled "C.S. Lewis"? We always have to take into account all the alternative -- or even wrong -- ways that someone might deposit the text string we're looking for onto a web page. Remember, there's no oversight. No copy editors to ensure that CS Lewis's name is always... Continued in next post...
Part 3 of 3 ...continued from previous post. ...spelled "C. S. Lewis," which, of course, is the completely correct way. I only spelled it "CS Lewis" because the woman to which I earlier referred in the other thread here spelled it that way. But, of course, the completely correct way is "C. S. Lewis," with spaces betwee the "C." and the "S." and the "Lewis" parts. But you can bet that people out there on the web have spelled it in any of the following four ways: CS Lewis C S Lewis C.S. Lewis C. S. Lewis[/list=1]and you can bet that on some of those pages -- even the ones where the author spelled it atrotiously -- there will be either something written, or a link to something, that you'll want to read or know about. So now, suddenly, if we're going to really help Google find all the CS Lewis info we can stand, without too much crap, we need to sufficiently narrow our search to just pages that contain CS Lewis, but we need to include all its various spellings so we don't miss anything. So, suddenly our little search string goes from merely wrapping quotation marks around "CS Lewis" to this: "cs lewis" OR "c s lewis" OR "c.s. lewis" OR "c. s. lewis" The word "OR" is necessary because Google always defaults to AND" and, without the OR it would have returned only pages that contain all four of those spelling possibilities. And the OR is capitalized because the OR and the AND boolean operators are the only ones that Google requires in all-caps so that it can differentiate them from the words "or" or "and" which you may wish to actually be in the search string. And, in that same vein, note that none of the spellings of CS Lewis in my search string, above, are capitalized. Except for the boolean operators OR and AND, Google pay no attention to capitalization. So that's just that much less pressing of the SHIFT key on your keyboard that you have to do. If you want, you can further refine your search to only pages which contain CS Lewis spelled in all four ways, but only on U.S. college and university web sites, by using the site: modifier and appending it, along with whatever kind of site to which you'd like to restrict the search, to the end of our earlier search string, as in: "cs lewis" OR "c s lewis" OR "c.s. lewis" OR "c. s. lewis" site:.edu The above string will restrict the search to only pages which contain CS Lewis spelled in any of the four ways, and only if said pages are on web sites owned by colleges/universities that use the .edu top-level-domain (TLD) in their URLs. Or you can use the site: modifier to further restrict the search to a specific college or university's web site, as in: "cs lewis" OR "c s lewis" OR "c.s. lewis" OR "c. s. lewis" site:taylor.edu There are other modifiers that are similar to site:... such as: inanchor: or allinanchor: which limits the search results to only pages which contain the search terms in what's called the "anchor text" of links to a page; or, intext: and allintext: which limits the search to only pages where the search terms appear in the text, or the main body of the page (as opposed to in the <HEAD> section of the page, in <META> tags like the description or keywords meta-tagged areas); or, intitle: or allintitle: which limits the search to only pages where the search terms appear in the <TITLE> of the page, in the page's <HEAD> area; or, inurl: or allinurl: which limits the search to only pages where the search terms appear in the page's URL. and the list goes on. Use of the plus and minus symbols is critical to good Googling, too. When you use them, you must try to visualize what any pages that you're looking for would contain. For example, let's say you're looking for knives, but not steak knives. If so, then you'd want all pages that contain the word "knife" or "knives" but not the word "steak." So, then, your search string would be: knife OR knives -steak It's a simple example that, actually, might be too limiting since the knives you want to find could be on the same page with the steak knives. If so, then the above string would deprive you of seeing any knives you wanted that just happened to be shown on the same page as the steak knives. But I'm just trying to show how the minus sign can remove stuff you don't want. Even though Google defaults to AND between all terms, the use of the plus sign is more precise. For example, if you wanted to see all pages that contained the words "knife" and "knives" but not "steak" then you could type: knife knives -steak but this would be infinitely better: +knife +knives -steak Or, if you wanted to be absolutely sure to include steak knives, specifically, but not paring knives, you could use: +knife +knives +"steak knives" OR "steak knife" -"paring" OR "paring knife" OR "paring knives" There's alot in that one string, but if you study it, you'll see alot of logic and precision in it. But don't go by what I'm telling you here. You really need to read a good tutorial and explanation; and then you need to print-out and hang-on-the-wall near your computer a cheatsheet or quick reference of all the Google advanced operators, including examples... ...and the very web site to which I pointed you earlier, above, is the place to get those things: The Google Guide You really should begin at the beginning of the guide, but if you want to get right to how to construct and enter good search strings, then click here. Be sure to also read the Understanding Results section so you can adjust and refine your queries based on what comes out. Then, be sure to print-out this Cheat Sheet and hang it on the wall near your computer so you will always have the syntax for the various operators handy. Hope that helps!
Same As usual, you outdid yourself. I'll print everything for reference and study. Thanks to both of you for the information. And Jack, you are right, only Gregg has the gift of explaining questions I have yet learned to ask. Gregg, When I've deciphered this material, I will be asking your assistance in producing a quality site, in increments, to show the process from infancy to fruition. I'd like a soi-disant appearance with elenchi minus sanctimony. And humor directed at process rather than individuals. Any input would be appreciated and acknowledged. My thoughts are fluid and open to suggestion. Clay Fonti nulla fides
