Just before the Thanksgiving holidays, one of the Internet's top three search engines changed its algorithms, the search criteria by which its engine "spiders" peruse websites and select them for results pages. Results are based on websites' relevancy to search keywords.

While changing algorithms isn't usually news, it makes a difference if a large class of hopefuls like Realtors get bumped from the Top 10 search results.

Relevancy is determined by how many people "search or link to it," says Bambi Francisco, a correspondent for CBSMarketwatch.

For example, the words "homes" and "real estate" may appear similar, but they deliver different results when combined with a city, like "Dallas homes" or "Dallas real estate."

That's why Realtors and their search engine placement firms have made a merry game of trying to imbed their websites with real estate-related text that use such keywords as metatags to attract the spiders. The lucky agents and brokers who choose the right words, among other search criteria, consistently rank in the Top 10 or first page results, but now, according to the results of a new survey, few brokers and agents will fare so well, suggests Peter Conti, spokesperson for Borrell Associates, Inc., a media strategist/analyst.

It's anyone's guess what the new algorithms are based upon. Instead of basing relevancy on how many people link to a site, it might be based on how many links are on the site to other relevant searches.

Another theory is that Google has sharpened its definition of relevancy. When a consumer searches for "homes" they aren't looking for an agent. The results could be lifting more sites to the Top 10 that are about properties.

"In the spring and the winter of 2002," explains Conti, "we typed in the city name and the word "real estate" and the city name and "homes," and then we tracked the top 10 returns for each search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo!) for about 20 cities."

When Google changed its algorithms, Borrell Associates broke out Google and ran some comparisons from its survey conducted a year ago.

Across cities large enough to return pages of results such as Spokane, Dallas, Detroit, Memphis and Sacramento, Borrell Associates found that in all three search engines (Google, MSN, and Yahoo!) real estate brokers and agents were in the Top 10 results about 32 percent of the time. In the week of December 1st, when Borrell ran a search just on Google for the same cities, Realtors "dropped off the earth," says Conti.

Last year, Realtors were in the Top 10 Google results 29 percent of the time, or three out of ten. Realtors dropped to nine percent, or one out of ten.

So who's getting the choice Top 10 positions instead?

According to Borrell, real estate-related websites with lots of links are edging Realtors out, namely Realtor.com and newspaper sites.

Newspaper sites appear to have lost little position, says Conti, from last year where their results dropped from 16 percent Top 10 positions to 12 percent.

While he hasn't yet run a similar result for Realtor.com, Conti recalls that Realtor.com was in the Top 10 "about one-third of the time."

The only city where rankings stayed close to the same, says Conti, was Spokane, where John L. Scott and Windemere real estate stayed about the same under the keyword "real estate." But with the keyword "homes," there were no Realtors in the Top 10, although Realtor.com made it in.

A search of "memphis homes" showed not one Realtor in the Top 10, says Conti, but Realtor.com was number one. Number two was the real estate section of the city's newspaper, The Commercial Appeal.

So what are Realtor.com and newspapers suddenly doing right and brokers and agents doing wrong? It's more what they have in common -- newspapers and Realtor.com have lots of links to other related sites that raises their relevancy to the search spiders' algorithms.

"A broker or agent isn't likely to have lots of links to other brokers and agents," says Conti. "And now to get placement, brokers and agents may have to pay for a sponsored link or bid for higher placement in the sponsored link section."

Being listed in search engines is important to Realtors. According to Borrell Associates' survey of real estate consumer behavior, 53 percent of consumers said they used a search engine to locate a real estate site.