Private islands - do they get priority in the search system?

I'm pretty certain places located on private islands get priority in the search system - when I try searches for various things (in the new "all" search) it seems that some places are only on the 1st page because they happen to be located on a private island and NOT mainland.

You get some right crappy places turn up on the 1st page - places with not much that's relevant to the search and with low traffic. I have emailed feedback to the search people asking them about this and they just seemed to evade answering me - saying how the search depends on many factors blah blah zzzz.

Does anyone know if this really is the case? Needless to say if it's true (which i really think it is) it's unfair!!

Interesting... and yeah it would be unfair, but doesn't seem likely?

If you need a 16m patch of private estate to test this, and a 16m patch of mainland for comparison, I'm willing to help. We could give them both the keyword 'supercalifragalistic' or something and see where they land, presumably identical in every other way.

What are the criteria?

No. Read the sticky.

Private islands outnumber mainland 4-1, it's highly likely therefore for a private island place to turn up more often than a mainland place.

No, parcels on private sims doesn't not score higher than those ones on mainland, ot to be precise: the location of the parcel doesn't play a role in the scoring algorythm (the size of a parcel does, at least in 2007, it seems that they weaked it lower (alot) the relevance, so actually it would be easy to place a very small parcel higher than one that is covering a whole simulator).
What does make the difference is that in most cases the shop owners that own a whole sim, have bought it on estate (because of the lower price, because of the number of avs, etc.) since they are not interested in renting affairs or so, so they doesn't really need mainland one.
Having a SIM so let you "play" with the search engine trying to score higher: you may strategical parcelizing with the relevant keys, you may object spam on different parcels, you own 15k prims to play with, etc.
So if you test the search engine using two identical parcels on estate or mainland, you would have the exact same result, *BUT* the two parcels (or to be precise: the two web pages that indexes the parcels) must be identical: not only same name, same description, etc. but even they must have the same NUMBER and TYPE of inbound links: external "pages" that are linking to your parcel (example: users profile picks), that are not handled just as a factor number but they gives a score according to their own score.
It's not an easy test to conduct, because you really be sure that anything is identical.

I think if the name of the region matches the word being searched for (estate or mainland), it should be fair game in the "all" search.