• Link Popularity (a concept mostly pioneered by Google) is important to the major search engines because it provides one of the strongest methods available for delivering highly relevant search results. If a search engine cannot deliver useful and relevant information to its users, those users will find another search engine. For the website owner or operator, Link Popularity becomes a strategy or tactic that can be used to boost site referrals and develop new online relationships. Market researchers and analysts are interested in Link Popularity because it provides a real-time marketing performance metric that is based on an index of independent and publicly available data sources (i.e. Google, FAST, Alta Vista, AOL, MSN, HotBot).