On Thu, 17 Jan 2002, Cooke, Tony wrote:

> Saliya
> 
> Try going to http://www.alltheweb.com/ and typing in "cars" or "real estate"
> and see what comes up as the first hit.

Tony,

This isn't evidence of 'the domain name being used as a search ranking
criterion'. Just evidence of a URL coming up first.

Do the same search on the same site with 'foo'. Does 'www.foo.com' come up
first ?

My theorem is that the domain name is not used as a ranking criterion by
any (major) search engine.

To disprove this theorem, you simply need a statement from a search engine
author or owner, saying that the domain name itself is used as a ranking
criterion by 'x' search engine.

I haven't found one yet.

Quoting results from particular searches of course does not constitute
supporting evidence (a statistically representative sample might; but I
think that such a sample might require millions of separate searches and
be fairly labour- and network-intensive :). It would be far simpler to ask
the search engine owner/author.

Regards,

Saliya