There are hundreds of search engines available today, but some are much more complex than others. This article will give you an overview of how some of the most popular ones work.
Let's start with a smaller engine: Info Seek. They only index about 200 words of your website, so it's important to make sure you have meta tags on your website and that the most important things are listed first. The information you put in your meta tags is used to display your website description, and most meta tags can contain around 200 characters of text. However, the keyword meta tag can be up to 1,000 characters long.
These simple rules are important to keep in mind for all search engines. The more important the information, the closer it needs to be to the beginning of your meta tags or even to the beginning of your website content. Many search engines won't even touch your meta tags, so it's important that you have the same information in your body as you have in your meta tags (although of course you can't just type in lists and lists of keywords, as that would be detrimental to your site's content).
The AltaVista search engine sends Scooter, its spider, to crawl your entire website. Scooter can take up to three months to crawl and fully index your site - the average spider only takes 6-8 weeks. Scooter will normally appear somewhere between two and ten pages from your site each week. This means that the longer your website lasts, the better it will be indexed, which is an example of how search engines implement Darwin's theory into their ideology.
Excite used to be a search engine, but has now been dropped as AOL and Netscape's search provider, making it less important than it once was. The algorithm it uses to determine keyword relevance is very complicated: it indexes your pages and then tries to summarize them by selecting only the most relevant sentences. Expect your site to be reviewed about once every two weeks. However, keep in mind that meta tags have no meaning for Excite when it comes to ranking, although it will use your description tags as long as the words are relevant to the content of your site.
Let's go to LY cos. LY cos has fully integrated the Open Directory Project (ODP) into its main results pages and also uses search results from All The Web. LY cos also runs click-throughs on their sister site Hot Bot. LY cos is one of the more difficult search engines to understand because their submission page says one thing, but then they index your site in a completely different way. Generally, your site will be indexed in LY cos in time if you are indexed in ODP and All The Web.
Although owned by Excite, Web Crawler still has its own search engine and indexer. If you happen to be listed on Web Crawler, you should try to stay listed with them, as it is not the easiest search engine to get listed with. Its hit-and-miss standards combined with sporadic indexing methods make the submission process challenging, if not impossible.
The biggest player is, of course, Google, which uses the PageRank system as the central foundation of its index. It used to be almost impossible to manipulate this page ranking system to increase your ranking, but people quickly figured out that the more links they could generate to their site on the rest of the web, the better Google ranked it. Google is not expected to use context-sensitive ranking. However, context-sensitive information is used by Yahoo, look smart, and ODP, and Google regularly crawls these sites when it reins d exes its own database.
MSN is another important search engine. The holy trinity of search engines is currently Google, Yahoo! and MSN. These three search engines combine to get you the vast majority of the traffic you get from the search engines. MSN will generally be the first search engine to index your site and will almost certainly display the most pages the fastest.
While no one can tell you exactly when you will be indexed in any search engine, it is best to check at least once a week. Whatever you do, don't resubmit your site more often than every two months - if you do, you might not get indexed at all.
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