Internet Search Engines Essay, Research Paper

Internet Search Engines How Search Engines Work Search engines are programs that crawl the web to compile lists of web sites so that this information can be used by people to find web pages that they are looking for.There are three major components to search engines. These are the spider , the index, and search engine software. The spider component to a search engine is the part the crawls through web pages reads them and then follows the links. The index element of the search engine is where every thing that the spider finds is stored. The third element to a search engine is the software. This is the program that is used by people to search the index. When a person enters in a search, the software sorts through the index to find web pages that match the description given by the person. The software then ranks the web pages by what it believes are the most important sites. This information is then presented to the user. How Search Engines Rank Web Sites The primary ways for search engines to rank web pages are the frequency and location of key words within a web site. Not all search engines use the same techniques to rank web pages but these are the two most common. Another way for web pages to be ranked are by meta tags. This is only done by a few search engines, mainly Infoseek and HotBot. Each search engine uses the common techniques mentioned above but each one has its own unique was of ranking web pages. This is why it is so hard for web page designers to consistently have their pages ranked highly on most of the search engines at a time. Meta Tags Meta tags are html coding within the fields of a web page and cannot be seen when a web site is viewed. One use for Meta tags is to provide a description of the site to search engines. These descriptions can include keyword or phrases that the creator feels represent the sites content. Meta tags however are not used exclusively for search engine ranking. Another common use for these tags are to provide instructions to web browsers to perform various tasks. Search Engine Test The web sites that I tried to fin were the Victoria Salsa and the Vancouver Sun. I tried to find these web sites with Infoseek, AltaVista, and Webcrawler. For the Vancouver Sun I tried the phrases British Columbia newspapers and Newspapers in Vancouver for all three search engines and both phrases I did not come up with any rankings. For the Victoria Salsa I used the phrases hockey teams in Victoria and Vancouver Island hockey teams and again I did not come up with any results. I am not sure why these searched did not result in any rankings. Even when I searched for The Vancouver Sun using the phrase The Vancouver Sun with Webcrawler the web page did not receive a favorable ranking, it was approximately 7th on the list. One reason why these sites did not receive a favorable ranking is that their names have words in them that can be possibly associated with many other pages. Words such as sun and salsa appeared in many other pages that were found. The titles of the web pages could have something to do with it. The title in The Vancouver Sun web site was The Vancouver Sun Top Ten Stories . The pages also did not include any Meta tags, this could be another reason. As well, the pages should be tailored so that they incorporate different things that the different search engines are looking for. For example, the web pages could use alt tags under images to be index by AltaVista, Infoseek, and Lycos or comments so that HotBot could index them.

Submit-it Submit-it is an on-line service that will submit you web page to search engines and directories for a fee. It is an easy service to use and there are only a few steps to follow in order to submit you entries. Basically after you sign up for this service you enter in information about you site such as the title, description of the site, and contact information then send it off. A couple of features of the Submit-it service are that it will check you pages using a Web Page Analyzer to check the meta tags and give hints on how to improve them, as well as spelling errors and dead links. This service also lets you customize some of the directories and search engines that the submission will be sent to. After you submission is sent, listings will be verified for the major directories and search engines. These results are made available to be viewed on-line. The starting price for the Submit-it services is $59 for 2 URLs. SelfPromotion.com SelfPromotion.com is a search engine and directory submission service. Information is entered about your site, then Tooter the submission robot will submit your entries to the destination of your choice. One of the main features of this site is that you can create an account so that the information that you entered can be stored for re-submission. This is useful if changes are made to the site and it needs to be updated in the indexes and directories. This is a ShareService and the suggested cost for using it is $5-$10/per URL for educational pages, $10 for personal use and $25-$50 for commercial use. With the contribution you account will be kept for a year (as opposed to 3 weeks if you don t pay) and you will receive access to other features. Some of these include tracking your search engine ranking, find out what pages have links that point to your site and a program to find out if there are any HTML coding errors within you pages. The only downfall to this site is that it is filled with a lot of useless information that you have to read in order to find out how the service works.