The Official Computer Tech Support Thread

[Freebase Dali]

Originally Posted by PoorOldPo

But if there are a large number of images relevant to that image, just say it was a historic even, and there are photos of tapestries and paintings. They are all relevant, but what makes one more relevant than the other? It is the amount of activity directed to those image in relation to the relevant subject?

In short, SEO. (Search Engine Optimization). And even that is behind people that pay Google to rank their results higher. But in general, SEO is the process of making your content more efficiently visible to a search engine via the use of proper tagging, header content, etc. And the result of that is typically that a search engine will rank such things higher in its database based on hits resulting from it.

For instance, if you take two make-believe sites that are exactly the same in every way, except on site A, you tag the picture data with relevant tags, all spelled correctly and just the obvious ones, and on site B, you include misspellings. Site B will get more hits, and will be ranked higher according to Google, because it gets more hits.

So it's a process of getting the hits via SEO, then being ranked higher because of those hits.
Of course, there are other factors. Google, for instance, ranks this very website higher for having a swear filter and not displaying gory images or linking to known gore sites. So when searching for "music forum", ours is likely to be higher than one that does not have a swear filter and gory content.

A lot of things go into it, but from the little I understand about SEO and search ranking, this is a pretty big factor.