How search engines rank results

Computer ScienceFiles, Storage & DatabasesAges 14–15

A small collection of twelve web pages with different titles, URLs, publish dates and trust levels. Students type a query into the search box and see how the engine scores each page: a keyword in the title counts for more than one in the body, then the score is multiplied by the page's trust level. Students can use the "exact phrase" operator, a minus sign to exclude a word, and site: to restrict results, then switch the ranking criterion to compare how the order changes.