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Search Engines-
A web search engine is designed to search for information on the World Wide Web and FTP servers. The search results are generally presented in a list of results and are often called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.
Search engines and Web directories are not the same thing;
although the term "search engine" often is used interchangeably.
Search engines automatically create web site listings by using
spiders that "crawl" web pages, index
their information, and optimally follows that site's links to other
pages. Spiders return to already-crawled sites on a pretty regular
basis in order to check for updates or changes, and everything that
these spiders find goes into the search engine database. On the
other hand, Web directories are databases of human-compiled results.
Web directories are also known as human-powered search engines.
Most major search engines have a page to use to submit your web site
to their search engine. However, it's not actually necessary to use
search engine listings pages (or hire a company to do search engine
listings) because most major search engines will simply find and
index your site by following links to your web site from other
sites.
An alternative to using a search engine is to explore a
structured directory of topics. Yahoo, which also lets you use its
search engine, is the most widely-used directory on the Web. A
number of Web portal sites offer both the search engine and
directory approaches to finding information. Due to the human editing of directories, there is usually a charge for
submitting your website for review. Yahoo charges $299 a year to be in their
directory but most experts say it is worth the money.
Individual Web sites, like
Floridian Nature, often use a search engine to index and
retrieve the content of just their own site. Some of the major
search engine companies, including Google license or sell their
search engines for use on individual sites. In fact with Google
Adsense you can get paid to have a custom Google search box on your
website.
In order to get good website traffic, you need to be indexed by the
major search engines and you will want to add your link to the top
directories. I think adding your website to directories is much more
productive than trying to do some sort of link exchange. Even if few
humans end up coming to your website from a directory, the search
robots will see the links and it can help with your PageRank. |
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