Search Engines and Directories

Understanding the Search Services

Search services can generally be described under two types sources: directories and search engines. These two types of search services quite often cause confusion amongst many people.

Search Engines

A Search Engine is designed to help people find relevant information on the Internet.

Search engine use special software robots, commonly known as 'spiders' or 'crawlers' to retrieve information from web pages. This type of service is called a 'spider-based' or 'crawler-based' search engine.

Search Engines will perform three basic tasks:

1. The spiders will then crawl the Internet and find web pages; this process is known as spidering or crawling. They then build many lists of words and keyword phrases found on each of the web pages.

2. The search engines will then keep a database of the words and keyword phrases that have been found on the web pages.

3. The search engines then enable us to search for keywords and keyword phrases found in their databases. The search engine will try and match the query wit the most relevant web page.

Search Engines include:

Google, MSN, AOL, Altavista, Lycos, Excite, Ask Jeeves & many more.

Directories

Directories are often confused with Search Engines, they are however completely different. A directory uses human editors to manually place web sites or web pages into specific categories. A directory is commonly called a 'human based' search engine.

Directories include:

Yahoo!, Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and many others.

For more information on how web-topia can help your site achieve higher rankings and positions in the major search engines, please Contact Us.