Virgin-Media Google Search

[Ellio]

Hi,

Has anybody got any clues as to why our site ranks much higher on Virgins version of "Google Search - UK Only" than the actual "Google - UK Only" results?

Extra filters must apply on Google that are removed on the Virgin API....

Ellio

[tedster]

It's been a common practice for search engines who supply data to other sites to offer customization to those partners. Inktomi was doing this many years ago, back when Google was still called Backrub and Larry was playing with Legos^TM (see below).

With Google offering personalization down to an individual scale, there's little doubt in my mind that they would offer a degree of customization for their various partners.

Some fun background triva:

According to Google lore, company founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were not terribly fond of each other when they first met as Stanford University graduate students in computer science in 1995....Their strong opinions and divergent viewpoints would eventually find common ground in a unique approach to solving one of computing's biggest challenges: retrieving relevant information from a massive set of data.

By January of 1996, Larry and Sergey had begun collaboration on a search engine called BackRub, named for its unique ability to analyze the "back links" pointing to a given website. Larry, who had always enjoyed tinkering with machinery and had gained some notoriety for building a working printer out of Lego™ bricks, took on the task of creating a new kind of server environment that used low-end PCs instead of big expensive machines.

[google.com...]