A Three Way Relationship: SearchEngines, Webmasters and Users

Search engines, Internet users and website owners are involved in a symbiotic

three-way relationship. Each party depends on the other two to get what they

need.

Users want to find what they are looking for on the Internet.

They use search engines to lead them to websites, and they favour search

engines that deliver the most relevant and useful results.

Search engines want to make money from selling advertising.

The more users they have, the more advertising search engines can sell.

Therefore, search engines must list their results according to relevance and

importance in order to attract and keep users. In turn, search engines favour

sites that are relevant and useful to users.

Website owners, webmasters and online marketers want search

engines to send traffic to their sites.

Therefore, they need to make sure their sites are relevant and important in

both the eyes of the search engines and the users.

Page and Brin sum it up in their pre-Google paper The Anatomy of a Large-Scale

Hypertextual Web Search Engine:

“The most important measure of a search engine is the quality of its search

results.”