A potential new direction in search engine technology can be experienced by visiting Clusty, a beta of a new search engine by Vivisimo. This new technology returns meta search results (results from various sources), but clustered (thus the name) as to subtopic. The best way to understand it is to try it out. You'll see what I mean.

Any webmaster interested in traffic is interested in how to get a superior Google ranking. Once you have a high ranking in Google, you will have so much traffic from it that you'll, perhaps to your detriment, begin to ignore other sources of traffic. One is left wondering how you get a better ranking.

A ranking in Google, and increasingly for all search engines of any significance, is a combination of votes by way of links, and relevancy, with the former provided by way of links, as mentioned. Further, in this web democracy's "election", which essentially is an ongoing contest, all votes are not created equal. It appears that many votes are essentially worthless, if not negative in value (penalizing).

This, of course, makes sense, when you think about it. A search engine technology's designer wants to generate relevant and useful sites. Votes from a gazillion irrelevant directories, and the like, mean nothing. Likewise, links from unrelated sites likely also mean nothing. Therefore, it makes better sense, in the interest of relevancy, to count only votes that are relevant, and even then to weight them based on their relative relevancy.

Google does this, they say, at least currently, via PageRank, which is essentially a mumbo jumbo formula that is always adjusting the importance of sites based upon votes and the votes of those that voted which are in turn based on the votes of those that voted for those that voted for the site, etc. This is much more intelligently reviewed at some other sites, such as these:

Google Explains Its Technology
Paper On Google Algorithm
SEO Rank Explains Page Rank
PageRank Explained
Anatomy of A Search Engine
PageRank Algorithm Explained
PageRank Improtance

As you can see, all of these articles are rather similar. However, if you are really interested in this subject, I strongly recommend that you read them all.

The good news is that there is quite a bit of literature. The bad news is that by the time you read this article, it will likely be obsolete.

As search engine ranking optimization professionals continue to manipulate their outcomes, the results will increasingly become different than they were originally intended to be. Meanwhile, tools such as Alexa are developing extensive databases of sites actually visited by real people. A visit to A9, which makes extensive use of this constantly updated database, seems to hint at the future.

Google may at some point, if they are not already, begin to penalize based on short periods of time passing between clicking through a Google link and returning to Google, an indication of irrelevance, poor quality, or both. This again seems to be a reasonably way of identifying sites that do not meet the web searcher's objectives.