I honestly can't remember what I used in the time leading up to me discovering google. I know as a primary school student in the mid 90's I vaguely recall arguing with my friends about whether Alta Vista or Lycos was better and the misguided attempt at marketing to kids that yahooligans! was. We're asked how search engines work, and being a bit of internet fiend I'm surprised I've never investigated in any length before. I ran into a number of sites that seem to throw out the same words to describe how search engines operate and return results;
Getting indexed and keyword density ;
One of the the main rules in a ranking algorithm involves the location and frequency of keywords on a web page. Call it the location/frequency method, for short.
Also a number of complex algorithms written by very intelligent men that I'll never understand.
Ranking of returned results
Wikipedia's explanation for ranking results ( complete with embedded links thanks wiki!):
By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce
the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.The three leading search engines, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages. Notable SEOs, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs.SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms..
Some sites I came across that give some interesting info on who search engines work:
20 Ways Search Engines May Rerank Search Results
These days, I'll always use google. I've had a bit of a bash around with Bing and if I'm at work I'll jump on yahoo for a client's sake ( a lot of them seem to use it as a search engine, so if I ask them to search for something I like to see what they're seeing) , but nothing stands up to google for me in terms of simplicity and ease of use. Imagesearch, blogsearch and other parameters I can put on my search make it better than anything else I've found.
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