hello,

i found this true when doing some research for microphones for stereo
recording.  on one engine, i don't recall which, any combination of search
words and order of words got the same 3 first hits if microphone was among
the words, even though the items in the hits were very different then the
key words should have narrowed down.  one of my favorite search engines is
google which is non-commercial, it is a research project at some
university as i recall, and uses a different paradyme for searching.
instead of comparing key words to page content, it finds the sites most
often visited based on the key words.  for example, if the key word was
whitehouse, the page related to the president's residence would most
likely come up first based on number of visits, even though there must be
tens of thousands of sites with that word in it's content.  it lets the
experience of the web searches done by thousands of others define what it
is that most people are seeking.

dan


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