What Does “Ranking” Really Mean?

From the outside looking in, search engines appear very simple: you find a page you compare it to other pages and you pick a winner. That naïve you is just about as far away from reality as you could possibly get. Ranking is only part of the operation of a search engine. In fact, for Google today, ranking is probably less than half of the process of taking a discovered and index page and deciding where to put it in search engine results. Here, I provide an overview of the different pieces of ranking at Google today, so you’ll understand the details in the next two chapters.