Web Search Engines AGED 3142

Search Engines Search engines (most have directories, too)  Yahoo  AltaVista  Lycos  WebCrawler  InfoSeek/Go.com  Excite

Marketing a Web Site Web sites are only effective if Web users are aware of the sites and can browse there easily As a Web designer, you must be aware of many types of search engines. Familiarity with various search engines enables designers to make their sites easily available to users

How Search Engines Work Search engine companies have “robots” or “spiders” that search the web 24-7 The spiders constantly organize the company’s database of internet addresses and their corresponding descriptive characteristics. Each search company builds its database differently, so the results of a Yahoo search may be quite different than the results of an InfoSeek search.

Searching The robots build the companies’ databases by several different search methods  Text in the HTML document  Words and phrases that are tagged as HTML links  Words in the HTML title meta tag  Words in the HTML description and keyword meta tags Some index every word of text in a site; others only index keywords and descriptions

Searching Most internet search companies and many, many other web sites maintain directories of topical indexes Designers need to know how to register their sites with various search engine companies and indexes This requires reading the instructions for many search engines and indexes But in addition to knowing how to register a site, designers must carefully choose keywords, titles, descriptions, and textual content of their sites