I’ve studied how search engines work. An integral part of any
Internet marketing or search engine optimization campaign is to know
exactly which search engines to target. This section discusses some of
the top search engines today.
Google
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years.
They went 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!
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 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, it will appear in the next index update.
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.
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your
entire site. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link
deep, so it can take a long time to index your entire site, depending on
how large your site is.
Inktomi
Inktomi's popularity grew years ago as they powered the
secondary search database that had driven Yahoo. 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 than that. Slurp puts
heavy weight on title and description tags, and will rarely deep-crawl a
site. Slurp usually only spiders 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.
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 too 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.
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 started
dominating 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 Yahoo!
or Inktomi.
Looksmart
Getting 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 your site is submitted and approved, it will take up to about
7 days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and its partner sites.
Top Search Engines
