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Online Manual - Search Engines - Understanding
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Understanding

Before you begin, you must understand what key word searches are. They are THE most common way people find information on the Internet.. This is it. When you want information quickly, and you don't know what sites are available, you are going to use keyword searches. Some people will go to a directory, but there can be so many levels of searching, that it gets frustrating. By far, your number one priority is to get on the search engine databases, and to be easily found. Pages out on the Internet are registered with the search databases, and so the goal for you, and the difficult task at hand, is for your site to be more easily found than all of the others. To accomplish this, you want your site to appear as high up on the list as possible in the result display of a key word search.

All search engines use the keywords input by the user to determine which pages it believes the users would be most interested in viewing. And each search engine company, such as Web Crawler, Yahoo, InfoSeek, AltaVista, etc., all have a different way of determining which pages come up in the results of a key word search. They do this by "scoring" all of the pages in their database, with the ones with the highest score being displayed first.

The simplest method of scoring, which was used extensively in the past, was for the search engine to count the number of times the key word appeared in the document versus the number of words in the document. So that the pages with the highest percentage came first, the one with the second highest came second, etc.

Nowadays, the search engines are a little more clever in their means of calculating which page gets placed first. Some only look at the title. Some look at everything, but ignore all comments, which is typically where people would repeat keywords in their document. Some look at only the first few sentences in your document, and will ignore repeated words, so that you can not cheat by adding the keyword many times. Most, look at the entire document, and give more "weight" or credit to words that appear in the title and nearer the top of the document, and less "weight" to those at the bottom. Many now give more "weight" to odd or not-so-familiar words such as "penguin" as opposed to words such as "web", "computer", or "home page".

It would be a waste of time for me to list the different search engines and the ways in which they score a page, because they tend to change like everything else on the Web. Some, like Web Crawler, still utilize the old standard of looking for the highest percentage of keywords, but they probably will change in the near future.

Once you register your site, the search engine goes out and "reads" your page. It automatically stores every word in its own database, so that when someone does a keyword search, the engine does not have to comb the entire web, but only its database. The obvious benefits of this are speed in searching and that it would be impractical for the search engine to read each page over the Internet every time someone did a keyword search. The disadvantage, is that once your site is registered, any changes you make are not included in the search engine's database. You must resubmit your pages to the database, so that it forces it to read your page again and copy it into its database. this may take from a day to a month. Some search engines will re-read every registered site once a month or some other pre determined time to update its database, but by re registering, you generally get a quicker update.

So, as stated above, the only variables in determining how high a score your page gets when someone does a key word search is the key words they use, and the placement of those keywords in your document.


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