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Posted: 10/11/01 5:47 am (General Tips) Search Engine Tips
By webpagedesigner
Learning the basics of using a search engine will improve the results of your search. The following tips work for almost all of the major search engines.
1. Knowing what a search engine is.
Search engines are a server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet webpages, storing the results and returning lists of pages which match particular queries. The indexes are normally generated using spiders, which surf the web, store the URLs and index the keywords and text of each page it finds. Search engines crawl the web and provide a listing of what they've found. Directories are listings compiled by humans. Web sites submit a short description of their site to the directory. The directory tries to match your query to information in the descriptions. The term Search Engine is frequently used to describe both directories and search engines.
2. Be as specific as you can.
The more specific your search is, the more likely you will find what you are looking for. If you are searching for information about a 1965 Ford Mustang, enter "1965 Ford Mustang", not "cars".
3. Use the - symbol.
You may want to find pages with some words but not another. For example, you were looking for webpages containing entries of Presidential Impeachment but you don't want to search through pages about Clinton, you would enter....."impeachment -clinton". This tells the search engine to find pages that contain the word impeachment but if it also includes clinton, do not list it with the results.
4. To find what you're looking for, it would be best to know where more than one search engine is located. Here's a list of addresses for search engines.....
Metacrawlers are similar to search engines but, they do not actually crawl the web to build listings like search engines. Instead they allow searches to be sent to several search engines at once and then blend the results into one page. Here's a listing of some Metacrawlers.....
I hope that these tips and listings will help you find the information that you need using Search Engines and Metacrawlers.
Edited by: atlass at: 12/15/01 4:09:14 am
Posted: 2/26/03 3:11 pm Re: (General Tips) Search Engine Tips
Here is some investigative work I did some time ago. It may help some of you.
Ok here it is. This is by no means "exhaustive" but after some research these are my findings.
How Search Engine’s search and index your web pages
Link Popularity:
Basically, the more sites that have a link to your site the better. Especially if those sites are ranked high with the search engine then your site will also rank high.
Full Text Index:
The search engine indexes all text content on each page.
Page Tag Title:
Page Tag, Title in the header of each web page. Your Title needs to be original and descriptive.
*head>
*title>A descriptive title goes here.*/title>
*/head>
Meta Tag Description:
Meta Tag Description in the header of each web page. Again this needs to be very carefully worded and as descriptive as possible.
*head>
*title>A descriptive title goes here.*/title>
*meta name="description" content="Your original description goes here.">
*/head
Meta Tag Keywords:
Meta Tag Keywords in the header of each web page. Very carefully chosen keywords that DON’T appear anywhere else on the page. Don’t try and spam the SE by duplicating a word more than 3 times. Use commas in between each keyword and try to string them together to make short phrases if possible.
*head>
*title>A descriptive title goes here.*/title>
*meta name="KEYWORDS" content="put your keywords, in here, commas, in, between”>
*meta name="description" content="Your original description goes here.">
*/head
ODP:
ODP stands for Open Directory Project. See dmoz.org. A number of search engines also use ODP as well as some of the above. You find a Directory that best describes your web site and add the URL to the relevant category.
Robots & Spiders:
Search engines send either Robots or Spiders to your site and it is these that collect the information to send directly back to the Search Engine database. Some have fancy names like googlebot and T-Rex.
Human Researchers:
Some search engines use Humans to physically visit the web site and index the site and add the human touch. Some researchers may be volunteers, some paid staff. This type of indexing can produce a human touch and also filter out any “nasty” sites.
Google: www.google.com
Uses Link Popularity and especially words contained within each web page on your site. Some of my pages have a high listing with Google.
Alta Vista: www.altavista.com
Uses Full Text Index – Every word counts and phrases do too.
Page Tag Title also weighed heavily. Ensure every page has a different Title.
Ask Jeeves: www.ask.co.uk
Uses Human Researchers, only sites with good answers to the questions asked by Ask Jeeves users want answered get listed.
Dogpile: www.dogpile.com
A META search engine that queries various SE’s on the WWW. Also has a web catalogue & open directory for site owners to add their URL.
Excite: www.excite.co.uk
Uses Full Text Index (I think!) Also uses the META Description Tag but NO other META tags.
FastSearch/All the Web: www.ussc.alltheweb.com/
Difficult to find any information on how this SE works.
HotBot: www.hotbot.com
Uses META tags, Title, Keywords and word frequency within the body of the document. Also length of text is considered and used for weighting purposes.
Snap: home.snap.com
Become a member of Snap, then you can add your URL to the Snap Live Directory.
Northern Light: www.northernlight.com/
Uses Full Text Index and “Natural Language” with some link popularity thrown in for good measure.
UK Search Engine/SearchUK: uk.searchengine.com/
No information available found on this one! Looks to be an ODP SE.
Infoseek/Go.com: www.go.com/
Uses META tags, Title, Description and Keywords.
Webcrawler: www.webcrawler.com/
Uses, Full Text Index (up to 1Mb) and the Title Page Tag.
Lycos: www.lycos.com/
Not much info, other than it uses spiders/robots and Open Directory Project.
In Lycos speak, FAST, TREX and ODP.
The majority of these SE’s have an “Add URL” link to enable you to add your URL manually. Some require a small form to be filled in others just require the URL.
Each Search Engine could take anything from a couple of days up to 2-8 weeks to index your site so be patient. Don’t keep re-submitting again after a few days because this is considered "spamming" and basically cancels your last submit and will stop your site from being indexed.
Although there are many "free" SE submitting programs on the market as well as "paid" SE submitting software that will do the job very well indeed, the problem with some of these programs is they also submit your site to "free for all" search engines or sites. Problem here is your site may end up listed along side a URL for porn or similar nasty! :(
A suggestion would be, add your pages or site to each SE every 3 months or so. Then in between this period check your listings on each SE before carefully reconsidering re-submitting once more.
I hope this is of some help to someone. It certainly opened my eyes.
Replace any * for less than sign (shift+period) in certain code above.
Posted: 3/10/05 4:45 pm Re: (General Tips) Search Engine Tips
And for those that would like to add a third party search engine on to their board, try www.freefind.com/.
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(General Tips) Search Engine Tips
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