Zivush - 1:42 pm on Dec 18, 2012 (gmt 0)

Besides user experience, page performance and user intent, which are keys, there are other factors.
I think the future of search (if not the actual present already) is that Google is not simply reading/saving bulk of data-content on that page, it’s learning deeply what the actual context on the page really is and how to classify it.
They also know (easily?) if the site is a ‘source of info’ for a specific topic.
How do they do it? A science fiction? No.
They may have a machine learning giant who “thinks” what’s behind the bla bla bla and whether it gives any kind of value to the users. (The same way as a good old speech recognition neural network works.)
+P.S forgot to mention personalization - Personal taste is a also a factor. Meaning, what I like is not necessarily what another person like when searching specific things.
They segment users by age, education, past searches, location, religion etc etc etc.