I don't understand "authority" or "trust"

[extra]

I've been reading to my eyes get swollen and red, but I can't find a common description on what Google say about "authrity" and "trust". I've seen that WW have a description to Jon Kleinberg's artical about authority, but nothing about trust. Still I see many people are using the word trust.

Main reason I want to know what this is that I have been very lucky regarding mye serp in Google. I'm far away from a pro SEO, so instead I have build my site slowly and tried to stay away from shortcuts that could influence my ranking in a negative way. This started up 5 years ago.
Last 3 years I've been so lucky having my site at position 1-3 for most important keywords. And it have never been left out for more than 6 weeks. Then it's back again at the top for long time.
About 3 years ago my new pages needed about 2 month to get to the top. Now it's straigt to #1-20 (depening on how hard the competion is for the spesific keyword).
My competitors often get out of the ranking, but when they are back the seldom get above me in serp.

Does my main serp and speed to the top meaning I have some trust from Google ?
It seems like many of you have MANY more links than I have so I'm probably no authority. To my defence I'm also writing in my local language in a small European country, means I don't have the same possibility for links from other sites as i.e US, UK or other large markets.
I have to admit I'm afraid for doing something wrong and it's better for me to be at place #10 than on page #10 by not doing seo that can hurt me. But are my ranking today based on trust or authority ?

[Marcia]

Here's an excellent thread on the topic from a while back:

Authority and Trust [webmasterworld.com]

[edited by: Marcia at 11:58 pm (utc) on June 13, 2009]

[extra]

Thanks Marcia.
I now understand why I'm not a pro SEO. It's a huge amount of info out there (your 2 links is for 66 pages alone), and worst is that some is changing all the time as Google change their algo. But authority and trust seems to stay, but the "value" of it is changing.
I think I have obtained some kind of lokal rank or local trust (as some edu institutes are linking to me), as this is the only way I can explain my ranking for the last 3 years.
I think I will stay with my engineering business and let you pro take care of the difficult stuff :).

[Marcia]

>>I think I will stay with my engineering business and let you pro take care of the difficult stuff

Don't know about that, extra. Sometimes less is more. :)