Wednesday, September 28, 2005
CheapBooks.com :: View topic - How To: Reverse Engineering Search Engine Ranking Algorithms: "Back in 1997 I did some research in an attempt to reverse-engineer algorithms used by search engines. In that year, the big ones included AltaVista, Webcralwer, Lycos, Infoseek, and a few others.
I was able to largely declare my research a success. In fact, it was so accurate that in one case I was able to write a program that produced the exact same search results as one of the search engines. This article explains how I did it, and how it is still beneficial today...
...While this methodology is good for learning a few things about search engines, on the whole I would not recommend making this the basis for your web site promotion. The quantity of pages to compete against, the quality of your visitors, the shoot-first mentality of search engines, and many other factors will prove that there are better ways to do web site promotion.
This methodology can be used for reverse engineering other products. For example, when I worked at Agency.com doing stats, we used a product made by a major micro software company (you might be using one of their fine operating system products right now) to analyze web server logs. The problem was that it took more than 24 hours to analyze 1 days worth of logs, so it was never up to date. A little bit of magic and a little bit of perl was able to generate the same reports in 45 minutes simply by feeding the same logs into both systems until the results came out the same and every condition was accounted for."
I was able to largely declare my research a success. In fact, it was so accurate that in one case I was able to write a program that produced the exact same search results as one of the search engines. This article explains how I did it, and how it is still beneficial today...
...While this methodology is good for learning a few things about search engines, on the whole I would not recommend making this the basis for your web site promotion. The quantity of pages to compete against, the quality of your visitors, the shoot-first mentality of search engines, and many other factors will prove that there are better ways to do web site promotion.
This methodology can be used for reverse engineering other products. For example, when I worked at Agency.com doing stats, we used a product made by a major micro software company (you might be using one of their fine operating system products right now) to analyze web server logs. The problem was that it took more than 24 hours to analyze 1 days worth of logs, so it was never up to date. A little bit of magic and a little bit of perl was able to generate the same reports in 45 minutes simply by feeding the same logs into both systems until the results came out the same and every condition was accounted for."
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