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Top Search Engines
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Ok, so you may know how the search engines work and you may
know that you need to be listed by them, but do you know
which engines get you more bang for the buck? In this
week’s installment, we will review the top search engines on
the Internet today.
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Google
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several
years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the
Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time.
Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the
web and provides updates to Google's index about once a
month.
Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by
far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned
from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has
become so popular over the years. Google has several methods
which determine page rank in returned searches.
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Yahoo
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on
the Internet today, and the site went live in August of
1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and provides
secondary search results using Google.
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around,
as far as web directories and search engines go.
Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult
to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your
site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get
listed.
Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a
Yahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next index
update.
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AltaVista
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider
named 'scooter' accessing their pages. Scooter used to be
AltaVista's robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update,
a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever
spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search
engines on the net today, next to Google.
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index
your entire site, although the past few months scooter
hasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista
will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good
amount of time to index your site depending on how large
your site is.
AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index,
however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from
Overture (formerly Goto).
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Inktomi
Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as they powered
the secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. Since
then, Yahoo as switched to using Google as their secondary
search and backend database, however Inktomi is just as
popular now, as they were several years ago, if not more so.
Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different versions of
Slurp crawls the web many different times throughout the
month, as Inktomi powers many sites search results. There
isn't much more to Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy
weight on Title and description tags, and will rarely deep
crawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages that are
submitted to its index.
Inktomi provides results to a number of sites. Some of these
are America Online, MSN, Hotbot, Looksmart, About, Goto,
CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ and many more.
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Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on the Internet
today, next to Altavista and Yahoo. Their spider, named
"T-Rex", crawls the web and provides updates to the Lycos
index from time to time. The FAST crawler provides results
for Lycos in addition to its own database.
The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags to heavily,
instead it relies on its own ranking algorithm to rank pages
returned in results. The URL, META title, text headings, and
word frequency are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to
rank pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame content.
However, any page that isn't at least 75 words in content is
not indexed.
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Excite
Excite has been around the web for many years now. Much more
of a portal than just simply a search engine, Excite used to
be a fairly popular search engine, until companies such as
Google seemed to have dominated the search engine market. As
of recently, Excite no longer accepts submissions of URL's,
and appears to no longer spider. To get into the Excite
search results, you need to be either listed with Overture
or Inktomi.
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Looksmart
Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting a good
amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's results appear
in many search engines, including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and
many others.
Looksmart has two options to submit your site. If your site
is generally non-business related, you can submit your site
to Zeal (Looksmart's sister site ), or if you are a
business, you can pay a fee to have your site listed. Either
method will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner
sites if you are approved.
Once you have submitted your site, and it is approved for
listing it will take up to about 7 days for your site to be
listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.
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AOL Search
America Online signed a multiyear pact with Google for Web
search results and accompanying ad-sponsored links, ending
relationships with pay-for-performance service Overture
Services and Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of
nearly three years
Take some time to register with these search engines as soon
as possible and watch the traffic grow.
Warmly,
erwin
