This should be an easy one.

I am looking for an online discussion (or explanation) of how search
engines -- especially Google -- work.

Basically I would like to read about this question: when you enter a
search term, why is #1 number one, and #21 number twenty one?

Is it merely a popularity contest, as I have heard?  In other words,
if I enter "Michael Jordan," is the first page displayed the one that
MOST people go to after having entered a similar term?

Does google sweeten the results for reputation of website, or
officialness?  Let's say some 11-year old girl makes a Brittney Spears
website which is, while popular at the moment, full of nonsense and
totally unreliable.  If enough people go there after having entered
"Britney Spears" on Google, will that site wind up being #1 in spite
of its amateurism?

If this is true, how is google different from other search engines,
such as Yahoo, Lycos, etc?

I realize that all search engines don't really search the net:  they
merely search a previously assembled database of textstrings, but what
interests me is how, on Google, #1 gets to be #1, especially compared
to the way this happens with MSN Search or Yahoo.

How do search engines work traditionally, and what's so innovative about Google?

Note:  I'm not interested in the technical algorithms, just the basic idea.

If someone can answer this question and can backup what they are
saying then this question is worth $10000000

The simple answer is no one knows exaclty how google ranks it pages
but i can tell you that the basics are this.

Google uses a technology called "Page Rank" which is made up how good
your website content is, how many back links you have (Ill come back
to back links in a minute), age of the website amongst other things.

It is made up of how many people click on a link when it appears on a
page but that doesnt mean that if your site is on page ten and you
spend all day clicking it that is would make a major difference.

I think the best example of how anyone can get to number one and how
there really is no favourtism is the search term "SEO". Google has a
page on this and it does not rank number one!

The thing is that anyone has a chance to get ton number one.

Backlinks are only really taken into consideration if you have a
decent backlink. A decent back link is a link from a site of similar
content, so if you have a site about fish and you get a link from a
music site, its pretty useless. Also a site with a good Page Rank is a
good back link.

The most important thing about any site is to have unique content.
There is no point copying and pasting information from a site because
the content already exists, and google knows that!

Also Google likes fresh content, if you change the information on your
homepage to have decent new content every day then google see's that
changes are made more so it entices it to come back more often.

A good site to look at for Google related information is 
www.seochat.com

A good article on Page Rage
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-PageRank-Frequently-Asked-Questions/

A good article on the age of website and the "Sandbox"
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Google-Optimization-Help/Google-Sandbox-Frequently-Asked-Questions/

A good article on back links and outgoing links
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Balancing-Inbound-and-Outbound-Links/

A good article on website content and useability
http://www.seochat.com/c/a/Search-Engine-Optimization-Help/Does-Your-Website-Have-What-Your-Visitors-Want/


At the end of the day, google will list whatever it see's fit as the
most suiting site for what the person is searching for. If the top
listing item for a search term is an absolute perler then it will
never lose that spot because its what people want to see. If it is
crap then google will change its algoritm and something else will get
listed there that is more appropriate.

Search engines used to rank by what is called "Meta Tags". Search
engines trusted people to place these tags in their code to describe
what the page is about. There are myths that google no longer uses
these tags at all because at the beginning people latched onto the
idea that if you just wrote porn a shed load of times in meta tags
then there page would be visited a lot by anyone looking for porn.

Now google searchs content on the pages, checks how many times a
keyword is on the page and also key phrases.

Google is innovative because it uses many different concepts to rank a
page and takes a lot of factors into consideration and 9 times out of
10 returns a great result to you and if it doesnt i can guarantee that
if you do the same search one month later that the search results will
be a lot better because they are always improving themselves.

MSN seems to be very lazy in the way that it returns results, it seems
that new pages get great results for some reason and you just seem to
drop down through the ranks over time. I have listed a new site up
there before now and it be for dog insurance and it ranked number one
then it just drops down the ranks.

Google seems to take its time in ranking pages, analysing the pages
over several months and then listing you. At the end of the day,
because google IS the most used search engine it can afford to take
its time in ranking people. Because MSN is trying to fight for more of
a share it just takes any web page straight away so that it can try
and return better and more results.

I think it is safe to say that i never use MSN to search and never
will. Its great if you want to get a bit big headed and say that you
got listed on MSN for a highly contested search term but at the end of
the day it is easy on MSN.

Hope this helps