The reason so many results are returned is that the search engines will break down your search term into individual words and search their index for occurences of that word. For example our search term was Costa del Sol Property. Therefore the search engine will search the index first of all for any references to the word costa. Then it search es for the word del. Then also for the word sol. And lastly it searches the index for the word property. The set of results are put together as a master set of results. But they are unsorted. So how does the search engine now sort the rsults to return the most relevant property results first?
The answer here is the beauty of the search engines and it is at this point that the different search engines begin to differ. In general the property results for a search term such as Costa del Sol Property will be sorted according to which of the results have all four words in the pages. So if we have a page that has the word Costa del Sol but no reference to property then this obviously will not be exactly relevant as it could refer to Costa del Sol jobs or Costa del Sol Mortgages. So any pages with all four words would automatically be puched to the front.
Then it is simply a refining process according to different rules of lesser and more significance. For example the results would probably go through many filters to resort them, google for example likes to put emphasis on the amount and relevancy of incoming links to a particular page or site. Others pay more attention to meta tags on the page. All in all different people searching for Costa del Sol property would find different search engines to be more or less effective. |
