Web Search Engines

1
Web Search Engines

• AGED 3142

2
Search Engines

• Search engines (most have directories, too)
• Yahoo www.yahoo.com
• AltaVista www.altavista.com
• Lycos www.lycos.com
• WebCrawler www.webcrawler.com
• InfoSeek/Go.com www.go.com
• Excite www.excite.com

3
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

4
How Search Engines Work

• Search engine companies have robots or
  spiders that search the web 24-7
• The spiders constantly organize the companys
  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.

5
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

6
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