How search engines list and rank websites?

[Theo]

In 2 weeks I will do a presentation about search engines and I need as much info as I can get. Do you know any good (free) websites that will explain how the most popular search engines rank the sites that have indexed? And how they choose which sites to index (if they don’t just take all of them).
Also, if some search engines have some special kind of policies that favor some kind of sites against others.
I would like to see your opinion also, but I am mainly interested on sites that will explain those kind of things in detail.

[Hoth]

http://www.spider-food.net would probably be a good place to start.

[Webdude]

We have a site that we never did open to the public. We had decided not to sell our proprietary software. The site however, is still up and does have some good info such as statistics and what have you... http://dexmaster.com/

Also, our meta tag generator is great and explains what most things in a tag does.. http://wzpro.net/supportdata/meta.html
That should help in your presentation to know those things.. Even Peo can vouch for my search engine knowledge. Back when I decided to prove it, and using our Dexmaster program and my meta skills, I rivaled him even on a search for "freewebspace" for the top positions in the engines :D I havent had Dexmaster running for quite a long time now though, so have lost the rankings. I always came in second to Peo, but that's because "freewebspace" is his domain..LOL

[Theo]

Thanks.
Hoth, I checked spider-food and it seems to be a good site.
Webdude, I will check your site also. Since you are an expert on web site rankings maybe you could share some of the secrets with us ;)
the query "freewebspace" as a single word maybe is not all that hard to get a top 10 ranking .. but what about "web space" or "web host" or ... "sex" !! :p