Search engine is a simple concept in itself. Search engine allows a Web user to search its index of crawled Web pages and displays results accordingly. The Web started with one document, then two etc., Ten years later the Web was billions of documents and 15 years later it was tens of billions of documents. How can a Web user get sensible results when searching billions of documents for a word like "business"?

The major search engines are actually trying to deliver sensible results to you when you search for a word like “business” with billions of documents with the word included. The task at hand may seem unsolvable, but it isn’t. The major search engines give Web sites some kind of rank and add value factors based on calculations and when a search is performed that returns “too” many results then these calculations are applied. The outcome is the search result the search engine thinks, or calculates, is the best for you.

The calculations behind ranking Web sites have been a source of endless discussions among webmasters. We don’t agree with certain calculations some large search engines use for our Web sites, but we understand that they have to use them; otherwise the search results would be useless. The Web has probably grown too large for search engines to rely solely on on-site content when indexing a Web site. Is it fair that a Web site’s visibility in the major search engines is based on off-site factors, but not entirely on on-site factors? We think it is fair enough and the only way to come up with reasonable search results for us, the Web users.

Artificial intelligence might help webmasters of the future to gain back more control of how their Web sites perform in search engine results, but until then there are no better methods available to the search engines to calculate the importance of a Web site than they are using today such as link relevance, site authority, popularity, organic discussions and organic link building.