Search Engines

This Page's Contents

Search Engine Introduction		definition 4 aspects of engines
List of Search engines and Directories		Google, Google-Images, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Bing, dmoz, HotBot Looksmart, Lycos, msn, Yahoo, WebCrawler, Web Page Archive Multiple Search Engine
How to use a Search engine	Exercise 1	Exercise 2 - Demo
How to submit your web site to engines and optomising your web site ranking.	Site Submission and Site Promotion has been moved to another page. Site Promotions

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Search Engine Introduction

From my Web Terminology page the definition for search Engine is 'A search engine archives the contents of web sites into a searchable database. By entering a suitable keyword(s) or phrase into the search engine, you can obtain a list of pages that contain the entered word(s)'.

Search engines send out software robots or spiders to roam around the Web. They note the words on a page and include them into a searchable indexed database.

An alternative to a search engine as stated above is the directory, where sites are indexed into a database of searchable categories and sub categories.

As a webmaster you should be interested in 4 aspects of engines. Steps 3 and 4 are covered later in the course in Tutorial 14 Site Promotion

1. How to use a search engine to efficiently search for information, this will mean learning some advance search techniques, which are very easy to do.
2. How to submit your site to engines.
   1. Then once listed, how to promote your site by getting your site ranking higher up that list.
3. Keeping an eye on similar sites to your own.

Each engine uses different methods on the putting together of there database of web pages, not all sites are included and sites that appear in more than one search engine may have a good ranking (position in the returned results) in one search engine and a very poor ranking in others.

Therefore you should not be surprised if the results of an identical search using different engines results in vastly different pages being suggested.

Once you have mastered "How to use a Search engine" in the next section, and "Advanced Searches" in the following section. You should try a few searches using identical carefully selected keyword(s) or phrases in several of the Engines, and the sites that combine results of several Engines. These are listed below.

You should experiment with both simple and advanced searches
See which engines return

1. The most suitable sites
2. The highest percentage of suitable site.
3. The clearest of site preview
4. A speedy result.

Give a mark to each search engine, the highest marked engine, you will naturally use the most.

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List of Search Engines and Directories

From a list of several hundred engines I have selected several of the top ones that should cater for the requirements of most people.

Google	www.google.com	This is my favorite search engine. It has over a billion pages indexed in it's database. Many pages are cached and can be retrieved, if the site closes down.
Google-Images	http://www.google.com/imghp?hl=en	Search for Images
AOL	http://www.aol.co.uk	AOL, besides having a search engine, powered by Google, and Web browser is a well known ISP.
Ask Jeeves	http://www.ask.co.uk	Ask Jeeves is different from the others in that your query takes the form of a question. Some strange results can be obtained.
Bing	http://www.bing.com/	Microsoft
DMOZ	http://dmoz-odp.org/	The DMOZ (Directory MOnZilla) Open Directory Project, powers AOL, Netscape, Lycos and HotBot.
HotBot	http://www.hotbot.com
Looksmart	http://www.looksmart.com/
Lycos	http://www.lycos.co.uk
MSN	http://www.bing.com/	Now Bing
Yahoo	http://www.yahoo.co.uk	Yahoo is one of the best known directories.
WebCrawler	http://www.webcrawler.com	WebCrawler obtains it's results from Google, Yahoo and Bing
Web Page Archive	http://www.archive.org	The Waybackmachine - Very useful reference archive of cached copies of over many billion web pages going back to 1996. See out of date web pages
SearchHippo	http://www.searchhippo.com/
startpade	https://www.startpage.com/	The world most private search engine

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Multiple Search Engine

There are a few programs available that you can obtain from magazine cover disks, or download from the web, that you instal and run from your hard drive. These will prompt you for your search query, check out several large engines and then provide you with the combined results.

Dogpile    Metacrawler     TheInfo

How to use a Search engine

In order to search for some information you enter into the input box of the search engine one or more words or phrases. Phrases are enclosed in "double quote marks". These works are called keywords

E1.

Step 1 If you are not on line, go on line now. Normally you would open what I believe is the best search engine available www.google.com, but that is not required because for this exercise I have brought the search engine to you, see below.

Step 2 Assumption.

Assume that you are studying the Open University course M206 Computing an Object - oriented approach, and wish to find a tutorial on the Smalltalk programming that is relevent to the M206 course one of the subjects on this course.

All the words in bold text in the above sentence are possible suitable words or phrases to search for. In Jan 2002 I searched for some of the above and the number of returned matches are shown in the table below.

Table of results on a single word or phrase

Keyword	Returned matches
"Open University"	15,700,000
T183	444,000
Html  Tutorial T183	167,000
tutorial	514,000,000
programming	544,000,000
Kompozer T183	563,000

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Step 3 The secret of successful searches is the careful selection and combination of your keywords. From what I have said in the assumption
Assume that you are studying the Open University course M206 Computing an Object - oriented approach, and wish to find a tutorial on the Smalltalk programming that is relevent to the M206 course one of the subjects on this course.

Pick out the 2 main keywords

Obviously Smalltalk is the main one, and because the assumption said, relevent to the M206 course, I would say M206 the other, tutorial being a strong contender.

Step 4 For the rest of this exercise you are going to use the following search engine that I have installed below

Search WWW Search tutorials4u.com

Ensure that the Search WWW option is selectet

Enter the following words into the input box.
Smalltalk M206
then click the Google Search button.

This search engine will look through its database for pages that have BOTH these words on the page.
Note most other engines will present pages that have EITHER of the 2 words on a page.
To find pages that have BOTH these words in them, these other engines would require you to enter either of the following
+Smalltalk +M206
Smalltalk AND M206

Step 4 Check the results

You should look at the result page produced. Look for the number of pages found near the top of the list, it was 457 when I tried it.

Note how the search words you typed in are displayed in bold within the extracts from different sections of the page.

Read a few of the entries and see how near they are to our requirements.

Look at the top, or near the top of the list for my M206 site with an entry similar to the following.

Clicking on the either of the 2 links in the Google entry, or in the above paragraph will take you to the Smalltalk and M206 site

Webmaster tip:
Just under the entry look for the word cashed, and click this. This is the page as cashed by Google the last time you they sent there robots visiting the site. If you are frequently updating your site and place a date when the site was last updated on your homepage then you will obtain an indication of when your site was last visited by the robot and the site database uploaded. This does not work for many of my sites because the date is generated by a JavaScript and the cashed process will update the date to todays date.
You may find this useful when you get your site listed on the Search Engines.

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Exercise 2.

Step 1 Add the word tutorial to the other 2 words and try again

Step 2 Take a note how the search results have now been cut down in number. By the careful selection of your search criteria you should be able to obtain the best possible sites for your purpose.

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