At 9:46 AM +1100 17/1/02, Cooke, Tony wrote:

>Saliya
>
>Try going to http://www.alltheweb.com/ and typing in "cars"

From the page:
meta NAME="keywords" Content=" cars, ...


>or "real estate"

Exactly. "realestate.com" doesn't appear on the first page of search
results. However, from the source of the #1 result:

meta name="description" content="The single source of international
  real estate information. ...
meta name="keywords" content="... real estate ...


>and see what comes up as the first hit.

So, we have just demonstrated that the domain name is irrelevant for
determining search result order for that particular search engine.

I'm sure there is a search engine out there that uses the domain name,
but I've tested the top 20 or so, and I can't notice any weighting
given to terms in the URL.

Nothing beats a well-constructed page for internet visibility.

I'd also be interested to find out whether or not alltheweb.com offer
keywords for sale and if so how many of the top 10 search results are
for customers' sites.

 ...Richard.