Search Engine Science

The purpose of this section is to analyse the way search engines work and have as much fun as possible.

The idea for this was determined by hours of search engine study for commercial purposes which eventually lead me to believe that anyone could alter the natural order of the search engine rankings simply by creating pages somewhat relevent to specific topics.

However in order to alter the rankings, we must assume that the big players will not be bias to our site. As soon as one of the big three decides to blacklist little ol' me, this experiment becomes useless.

Let us see if we can skew the results!

The following is believed to be true when trying to determine a VERY generic algorithm to attaining search engine rankings:

• The page must have sufficient body copy such that a search engine may be interested in what it is about to eat
• Key phrases in page titles and urls help rank
• Repetition of the key phrase in the body helps rank
• Proximity to the top of the document helps with page rank
• Rank is mostly a popularity contest, the more people that link to you the better

Coroporations spend millions of dollars a year trying to get to the top of the search engine game, this experiment attempts to prove that a little search engine optimization can get normal folk to the top of the heap.

The List

Here is a list of phrases that we will try to get some ranking on. Remember this is all in the name of science!

Non-commercial Terms

• can you drink a gallon of milk in an hour
• Burlington Ontario Canada

You Can Help!

Feel like helping with this experiment? Here is the situation:

Sites like Google are basically popularity contests. They have a ranking system called PageRank (PR) which basically tells you how popular a page is. You can see a page's PR by using the Google toolbar. The higher the PR the more popular the page in the eyes of Google.

When I started this experiment, this page and the root URL had a PR = 0

This site's PR will increase as the number of sites linking to it increase. So you can help by linking to this site simply using your blog. Once the PR of this site increases, the more likely we will be able to skew search term rankings providing we avoid the blacklist.