scavenger hunt

Q- What is a search engine?
A- A search engine is a tool used to search the world wide web.

Q- How do seach engines rank the stuff they find on the internet?
A- Some search engines will rank their results by relevancy according to various criteria like how often a term is searched by other users.

Others will place the companies that 'pay' for their sites to be listed at the top most of the searches.

Q- Who, or what makes one page (that you might get in your search results) more useful than another one, so that it is put at the top of your search results?
A- The more topic-specific your words are that you enter into the search engine, the more useful a page will be as a result of that search. Therefore, if you put in a search request for something as broad as an object, like books, the results will be in the thousands. However if you entered something more specific such as sci-fi/japanese books, your search results would come back much more narrowed and closer to what you want.

Q- What are some of your favourite search engines? Why do you like one more than the other?
A- I personally prefer google.com only only because the name is easy to remember :) and also because the homepage doesn't contain loads of advertising articles and junk. I find I almost always find what i am searching for, first go with google...whereas one such as yahoo.com tends to advertise their 'favourite' or home-sites so i have to look a little harder.

Q- Can you find some current news stories about the search engines?
A- apparently, so yahoo has just told me... G oogle News has just gone mobile! this means that certain people with the right sort of mobiles (the lucky and rich ones!) can access news from google on their mobile phones. The news articles that can go to the phones, however, are only the articles that have been optimized for mobile users.