...on bing.com, anyway. I've had the number one "Dave's Home Page" in the past too, but it's dropped down and risen back up a bunch of times. I checked it out on bing.com today, and I'm back to number 1. I'm nowhere to be found on google.com, but I don't know why. Google has been in the news a lot for being primarily an advertising instrument, and not showing accurate search results. Accurate search results? Accurate search results are supposed to be those based on the number of hits your website gets. ...so, I choose to believe that Bing is the search engine with honest results.
Why did I put "Dave's Home Page" in quotes? When you search for a string on the Internet you have to put it in quotes, or your get an or'd search. Or'd? The term "or" comes from boolean algebra. In boolean algebra "or" means you are interested if any element in a set of elements exists in another set of elements; if yes, this returns a value of "true". In the case of a search, if I searched for Dave's Home Page (notice the lack of quotes) then I would get hits (a boolean return value of "true") on pages that contained Dave's or Home or Page. If there were 1,000 pages called "Dave's Meat Market" that had more hits then any "Dave's Home Page" then my web page would be burried under all those "Dave's Meat Market" pages, even if I was the number one "Dave's Home Page" at the time of the search.
You can gather from the above that I'm only concerned with my ranking among other websites called "Dave's Home Page". Somebody with a commercial site would be interested in searches that used the "or" approach. Those commercial users can pay search sites (Bing, Google, Yahoo, etc.) to put them higher up in a search. There are other techniques for raising your search standing; e.g., putting links all over the Internet to your website, or my Illegal Method For Improving Search Standings ...but, my site is "natural".
