Got an interest? Sure, everyone does. Trillions of things intrigue people every day, and stimulate their minds to wonder, and want to know more. Who wouldn't use the easiest, fastest, and most popular method to scratch that itch and satisfy his or her curiosity?

Who wouldn't just "Google it" when they have a question, concern, or five minutes to kill? Google provides targeted searches which supply the searcher with a great number of results pulled from the far reaches of the internet. Who wouldn't want that? This article will explain cases in which Google may not give you the most bang for your buck, and point you to the niche websites which may just reveal that esoteric Malaysian barbecuer's survey you've been aching to pore over.

Google's search engines rank pages based on how many "linkbacks" they have. The more links which point to a given website, the higher ranking that site will have in Google's search results.

What does that mean? In short, Google is one big popularity contest. Imagine the World Wide Web as a literal web. Websites with the most connections to other sites, or the most central and popular ones, become the only ones searchers can find.

That may not be bad in itself, right? You don't want to have to sift through hundreds of new or long-abandoned blogs on computer hardware development in order to find the one which covers the last seven years in technological development, right? Popularity may not be a foolproof test, but it is at the very least an indicator of quality, right?

That would be true, but for the fact that website owners discovered that Google's page ranking system operates on the basis of linkbacks. Now owners troll sites like their own hoping to exchange links, and spam communities with their link, just praying that Google's spider comes crawling that way. Google has issued a release saying that they do not endorse "link spamming" or other questionable practices like paid links designed to increase a website's ranking, and that they reserve the right to strike any site caught doing so from their results page. That hasn't really done much to curb the trend, since there's not really any way to make sure no one paid you to put a link on your page, and inferior pages with admittedly dedicated webmasters have risen to clog the pipes of Google's well-oiled machine.

What's a searcher to do? What other options are there? No other search engine has wrangled an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary. Could there be

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