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What Are Search Engines?
You are probably saying to yourself right now, "I know
what a search engine is, it's what I use to find what I want
on the internet." And you'd be right, but search engines
are much more. What most people don't understand is that search
engines are a very powerful marketing tool that if used correctly
can bring you outstanding rewards.Before we get too far ahead
of ourselves, lets find out what the different kinds of search
engines are.
One type of search engine is the "crawler" or "robot"
search engine. This is what most people think about when they
hear the name "search engine". In essence what this
type of engine does is follow links from one page to another
indexing the contents of whatever it comes to. For many of these
search engines it is not necessary to "submit" your
site, since the idea is that one way or another all sites on
the web are connected and your site will be found if given time.
A second type, and the second most thought of type of search
engine, is a search directory. In essence this isn't a search
engine at all. These types of search engines are usually man
edited, meaning that someone will get your link and visit your
site to see if it is good enough to be listed within their directory.
These usually have categories for your site to be kept in, so
that people can also browse for your listing instead of just
searching for it.
Another type of search engine is a hybrid. These search engines
are actually a mixture of the two above types, combining some
directory listings with spidered listings. The idea of these
search engines is that if both of the above systems work well,
then combining them will work great. Usually these search engines
are just shells that read the index from their partners and
either re-index them to their specifications, or leave them
how they are.
I mentioned a search engines "specifications". These
"specifications" are actually mathematical algorithms
which take different on page and off page criteria in order
to decide for the "relevancy" or "usefulness"
of your site. Unfortunately I can't go into too much detail
about what these criteria are within the frame or this article,
especially since each search engine has a different algorithm.
These criteria range from the number of words in your title
to how many links you have on your page, and make note that
more is not always better.
I hope that we have been able to answer some questions you
may have had about what a search engine actually is and a little
bit about how it works. If you have any questions you can send
us an
E-mail
and we'll answer your question as promptly as possible.
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