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? We will review the top Search Engines on the Internet today.
Google
http://www.google.com/
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.
Yahoo
http://www.yahoo.com/
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.
AltaVista
http://www.altavista.com/
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named 'scooter' accessing their pages. Scooter used to be 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.
Lycos
http://www.lycos.com/
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.
AOL Search
http://www.aol.com/
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.
|
