What
are Search Engines?-
Very
Basic Concepts- Search Engines are basically programs
designed to create what you might think of as a Yellow Pages
of the web. Search engines "crawl" the Internet
and create copies of every webpage they find and put them
into a database. They then take all of these webpages and
analyze them so that when a user goes to the Search Engine's
Website and searches for a phrase, the search engine looks
through its database of websites and selects the most apppropriate
ones.
Where
Did They Come From?-
The
three first modern-style search engines were launged in 1994
starting with WebCrawler which was created at the University
of Washington. The second was Lycos which began at Carnegie
Mellon University, and finally the pernial Yahoo!. The King
of all search engines, Google, did not officially launch until
September 1999, and was orginally programmed by two individuals
from Stanford University. As you can see the majority of search
engines had educational roots. The search engines themselves
are actually very complex programs written and designed to
make sense of the growing Internet of websites.
How
Do Search Engines Find My Website?-
Search
Engines find websites in one of two ways.
First:
Crawling search engines such as Google will find your website
by following links on other websites. If there is a website
out there that has a link to your website on it, and Google
knows about that page, then they know about yours too. Crawling
search engines follow link after link in the hope of finding
every web page on the Internet.
Second:
Crawling engines don't mind getting a little help, and will
usually offer a page where you can submit your website to
be crawled by the engine. Some search engines will only find
your website if you submit to it, or will take much longer
to find if you do not submit to it (AltaVista). And some search
engines will charge you to submit to it in order to find it
sooner and on a regular basis (AskJeeves, AltaVista, Inktomi).
How
Search Engines Read Your Website?-
Search
Engines generally read your website in a purely text format.
They do not know what your images look like, or say, unless
you tell them. Generally speaking (and this is changing) they
do not read Javascript, they cannot understand Flash, or Shockwave,
and sometimes they cannot read websites that use complex URLs
like some shopping carts use. The best website for a search
engine is a plain text website with lots of links, but then
again, you have to think about your customers too.
What
are the Important Search Engines?-
The
most important search engine is the one that will bring
your website the most traffic. And as of today that search
engine is Google. An important thing to remember when thinking
of search engine importance, is that some websites, and
even some other search engines, do not have their own "search
engine technology" and will often use other company's
technology to run their search services. The most obvious
example of this is Yahoo! which does not run its own search
services presently, and is using Google results. AOL along
with a long list of other sites are also using Google results
making Google THE most important search engine on the Internet
as of right now. Not to say that there are not plenty of
other important ones. Click
here to see a chart of the relationships between the major
search engines.
