I was thinking about how often people, when hyperlinking something, simply attach the hyperlink to the word "here." (As opposed to a more descriptive phrase.)
That got me thinking about how Google works. Google generates its results in part through the words used in reference to a subsequent page. So, for instance, if lots of pages include links like, "See this page for more information about this term," Google will rank that page more highly when people do a search for "this term."
So then I started wondering which page Google found most authoritative for the specific term "here," since so many people make links say things like "for more, click here." To find out, I did a search.
The search yielded a lot of results. "About 10,700,000,000" of them, in fact, but what I thought was interesting were which pages appeared at the top of the results:
A link to the Adobe reader, a link to real.com, a link to the Flash player, a link to mapquest, a link to the Quicktime player, a link to browser.netscape.com, a link to download ie and then a link to the Microsoft download center.
The next page's links pointed to:
WinZip, Bittorrent, The American Red Cross, XE.com (the "universal currency converter"), WinAmp, AIM, Java.com, Disney, and Netscape.com.
I guess that's what most people think is there when they point to "here."
Comments (1)
Was the link to my blog on page 3?
Posted by Igots | March 9, 2006 5:01 PM
Posted on March 9, 2006 17:01