What exactly the term "Organic Search Results" means? and on what logic are the search results ranked?

Question

I want to understand on what basis do the search-engines organize and rank the results that are shown when a user asks for a search keyword to engines like yahoo/google. Also, how did the term "Organic" got associated to these results? Are organic results purely an output of "perfect-competetion" (as they say in Economic), or do they also have to pay to get included in results though to a lesser degree than paid results ?

Answer 1

Just an opinion here, but the word "organic" is one of the most over-used words in the English language today - usually over-used by the people that are trying to sound really smart...but end up merely confusing their audience. 20 years ago the word "organic" meant something grown from the earth. Today the term as truly lost any real meaning.



Other words that are over-used are "upstream" and "downstream" in business talk.

Answer 2

Organic means it "grows naturally" from the web content rather than being influenced by paying customers as the results displayed in sponsored search. Not clear who coined the term but is mostly used at Google and Yahoo!

By definition organic cannot be sponsored and influenced by paying customers

See the new edition of Modern Information Retrieval - especially the Web retrieval chapter, the book has been published but some content including that chapter is available for download on the book site at http://mir2ed.org/

You will understand the basic principles of how it works (disclaimer I am a co-author of that chapter)





Sponsored search or paid search typically on the right side or top of the results do use some relevance criteria as well, click through information but also follow an auction model and budget (see the recent course given by Broder and Josifovski from Yahoo! Research at Stanford University on "computational advertising" )

http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande239/

Answer 3

they are not paid advertising, if you type anything into google everything to the right is paid advertising, also the first 3 or 4 ads at the top that have a pink back ground, the rest to the left are organic, or natural search results.

Answer 4

My Yahoo search stopped working past 2days, big time waster! I enter search terms that have previously returned many results in my mail. Now I get no results no matter what I enter. Why does the mail search no longer work? I use it all the time and am in real trouble without it.

Answer 5

Organic search results are not paid results. You cannot pay to get ranked better. You can pay to show on the pay per click results.