The Search Engines in Detail

Contents of The Search Engines in Detail:

• Google
  
  
  Google Definition
  On this page, we decided not to make own Google definition. To give an opportunity of multifaceted understanding of this search engine, the list of Google definitions, found at other sources, is presented. If you tape in the browser of the describing search engine the phrase “Google definition,” you could find the same results we’ve gotten.

  Google Definition

  “The Internet's most popular search engine. Can be found at www.google.com”

  On www.ketteringwebsolutions.co.uk the following definition of Google was given: “The Internet's most popular search engine. Can be found at www.google.com”. This states that Google has success in the world of search engines and the URL of its Home-page is www.google.com. The glossary of www.satellite-tv-hq.com/ agrees with above and gives the next Google definition: “The world's current dominating search engine.”

  Google Definition

  Google is a search engine owned by Google Inc. whose mission statement is to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”.

  These both statements are proved by the next Google definition, made by the free encyclopedia “Wikipedia”: “Google is a search engine owned by Google Inc. whose mission statement is to ‘organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.’ The largest search engine on the Web, Google, receives over 200 million queries each day through its various services”. This Google definition formulates the main mission of the search engine. The efforts of Google are evident, and it is confirmed by the number of queries, over 200 million each day. Such activities illustrate this Google definition, as the most popular search engine.

  Google Definition

  “Google scans web pages to find instances of the keywords you have entered in the search box”

  In the glossary of UNC Libraries (www.lib.unc.edu), there is the following Google definition: “Google, a popular search engine, is a tool for finding resources on the World Wide Web. Google scans webpages to find instances of the keywords you have entered in the search box.” From this Google definition, you can understand that when a man enters the definite keyword to the search box, Google begins to scan webpages, looking for the instances. Let’s absorb in this process. Actually, Google doesn’t scan the Web during the search request. It has the huge database, called Index, where a large amount of webpages are situated. It counts little more than 8,000,000,000 pages for today. Index is constantly increasing and gets information from “spiders.” Search engine “spiders” or “crawlers” surf the Web all the time looking for some changes there. If they find recently posted pages or updates of the existing pages, the information is evaluated. If the new page is treated to be the relevant source, it gets to the Index. All updates, qualitative and non-qualitative, will influence on the rate of the pages in results of search requests.

  Google Definition

  “A web search program that ranks web pages in a list of hits by giving weight to the links that reference a specific page”

  The glossary of Digital Libraries by William Arms (www.cs.cornell.edu/wya/DigLib) gives another Google definition: “A Web search program that ranks webpages in a list of hits by giving weight to the links that reference a specific page.” This Google definition mentions the comprehension of ranking of webpages. When a user gets the results on his request, he finds the list of pages listed in the sequence of their rank. This happens due to the third element of Google, after “spiders” and “index,” which could be called “software.” It scans the Index and presents the consecutive list of the most relevant pages on search query. Webpages are ranked according the algorithm of Google, which is kept top secret and is constantly being improved upon.

  Google Definition

  “Search Engine, inclusion in which is free”

  At the SEO glossary of www.optymise.co.nz, you can find another Google definition: “Search Engine, inclusion in which is free.” It’s true that you can suggest your site for submission at Google for free at http://www.google.com/addurl/. Actually, Google’s spiders could find any way your site through the links of other sites. However, if you don’t want to wait until they find it or you don’t have inbound links, the submission procedure should be used. If a spider, however, finds your webpage, you should not wait for it to be indexed in a moment. It could take for few months, but, in the case, it is worth being indexed.

  Another characterized Google definition is given at one of lessons of Web CEO University (http://uni.webceo.com) reads: “Google is by far the most important search engine. Apart from their own site receiving 350 million searches per day, they also provide the search results for AOL Search, ICQ Search, and Netscape Search (amongst others).” The fact about the level of this search engine is evident and confirmed one more time with this Google definition.

  
  
  
• Yahoo!
  
  
  Yahoo! is one of the three major players on the search market (the other two are Google and MSN). Being Google's main competitor, Yahoo! uses its own directory as a main source for feeding results to web surfers. The Yahoo! Engine is covered in detail in the articles of this section.
  
  
  
• MSN
  
  

  MSN Search Engine

  The MSN search engine is one of the three major players on the search market (the other two are Google and Yahoo!). MSN is owned by Microsoft, and its history as an independent engine is rather short—MSN only recently started to use its own Web spider to compile the database of webpages. Up until this point, they used Inktomi’s database. The MSN search engine is covered in detail in the articles of this section.
  
  Today what people call a search engine is generally a much more complex Web search portal. It is designed as starting point for users who need to find information on the Web. However, on a search portal, you can find many different search options and services. MSN is featuring Web search and also shows news, weather, links to dozen of sites on the MSN search engine network, and offers from affiliated sites.
  
  Like other major engines, MSN search engine uses spiders to crawl the Web. Therefore, as a crawler based engine, it has spider software, search engine software, an index (database of sites found by spider), and the last important component, a relevancy algorithm. At first, spider software follows the links from the sites kept in the database for finding and changing information. That helps engine to build index of sites. After this stage, information is processed by the help of servers to calculate sites’ relevance. It is widely known that each search engine uses sophisticated and complex algorithms for this purpose.
  
  During the indexing stage, crawler-based engines consider even factors that are not found on your pages. They are so-called “off-the-page” factors, so before putting your page into an index, a crawler will look how many other pages in the index are linking to yours, the text used in links that point to you, what the Page Rank of the linking pages is, whether the page is present in some directories under related categories, as well as other factors. From the other side, you can artificially increase your page relevance by “on-the-page” factors such as using targeted keywords, adjusting the corresponding areas of HTML code, and others, but, of course, you can hardly control other pages in the Internet, those which link to you. Thus, off-the-page relevance prevails in the crawler’s eyes.
  
  To rank highly on MSN search engine, you should build a rather big site. The number of links you garner will also affect your ranking as long as properly chosen primary keywords, which your pages should be focused on, are used. Also, don’t forget about relevant theme of your site. MSN doesn’t use Google’s types of aging delays. This means that if you change the content, the changes in results will be found as soon as the MSN search engine reindex your pages and find your incoming links. These and other rules and techniques will help your site become visible for MSN search engine and not to do idle work as the site’s design is meaningless if your pages are ranked low.

  
  
  
• Others
  
  
  The search market has three definite leaders (Google, MSN, and Yahoo!), but it is not limited to these only. There are other engines possessing a significant share in the market, e.g. AskJeeves / Teoma. The articles on those engines will be covered in this section.
  
  
  
• Directories
  
  
  The term "Directories", or "Human powered" search facilities, mainly refer to online catalogs which categorize Web sites into thematic sections. Yahoo!, along with the regular Web search, offers one of the most complete catalogs on the Web. When you submit a site to a directory, it is queued for editorial review. Usually, when you submit, you are allowed to choose the category your site will be placed under, as well as to enter the desired description and title for your site, which will show in the related category. However, the actual presence of your site is subject to the editor's decision when he or she browses your site. Directories DO NOT accept automated submissions and have special means to protect themselves from auto-submission software. You should always submit manually to a directory.