How does Google determine what's relevant?
 

Just did a search on "free trailers" and Google said there were 84,000,000 results

On page two it said "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 18 already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

18 results!!

That's some algorithim - 18 results deemed relevant out of 84 million!!

I don't attempt to understand the insane. I just make sure I'm sane enough to react rationally whenever an insane person is in my neighborhood. :D

Ah, before you can understand the workings of Google you must get yourself in the same frame of mind as them |potleaf|.
Then, you take your favorite random number generator and Ouija Board and try to get a pattern going (the results will be what Google wants to see as your keyword density for top serp and also the next winner of the mega millions).

I don't know how it works, but, I love seeing my direct sponsor links showing up as the relavent page rather than being one of the other 50,000 pages.

I think mysteriously is the answer. One of the cams sites I promote, I just built myself a site ten days ago and totally by accident if you put their URL in I come as googles no 1 ... I dont understand that at all. I am sure google will stick me back in the sandbox soon but I am enjoying the good quality traffic while it lasts!

eman,
"free trailers" is kind of a vague search term and probably causes some confusion within the algo. What type of free trailers? movie, porn movie, FEMA, camping? That might be their way of telling you to refine your search.

If I knew the answer I would be writing this on my private jet

I've got a theory - and I think it all boils down to what's relevant for Google.

"free trailers" produces just one sponsored link and so from Google's point of view the search isn't relevant in money terms. Why bother displaying seach results when you can encourage the surfer to look for something else - something that will generate some income from adwords.

"private jet", on the other hand, generates a load of ads - 4 complete pages, in fact - so the search is relevant

In other words, Google is now less about relevance of content, and more about relevance of income from adwords.

That's what I think, anyway.

Hopefully Google will soon become less relevant.

eman - there actually is an explanation for what you saw and exactly how that "see the omitted results" works

First - the reason that you saw the issue with the pages low count - they are currently redoing the entire database with a refresh that is taking a little longer than normal - and it hasnt totally propagated throughout their datacenters - so results are a little off right now

Second - the ommitted results command works like this:
When they show results for a search they only allow two results from the same page(URL) - that has been part of their algo forever - when you "click to see the ommitted results" it adds in the rest of the pages from that site - the way it does it is in the URL when you click to see the ommitted results is they add &filter=0 to the url which turns off the dupe filter (normally if they are not in an update)