WHAT IS A SEARCH ENGINE?
When people look for things of interest to them on the Internet, they go to search engines and directories. A directory is a listing of category subject headings with Websites listed under the specific categories. You browse through (often called "drilling down") the categories until you find what you are looking for. Search engines, on the other hand, have a form in which you input keywords, and pages of results are displayed. The results are lists of Websites that pertain to the keywords you have used.
Search engines seek out and index Websites on the Internet according to keywords. When a user types a search phrase, a search engine scans its database and returns a list of successful matches to the request.
WHICH SEARCH ENGINES ARE IMPORTANT?
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, as of the date of this writing, search engine popularity within the top 25 online properties is as follows, with the most popular listed first:
Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, Go.com, Excite, InfoSpace, and Ask Jeeves.
HotBot, which has always been a very popular search engine, is now part of the Terra Lycos Network. Other search engines worth noting but not presently in the top 25 online properties are Northern Light and LookSmart.
Thus, although there are thousands of search engines, you can narrow your main focus down to just those mentioned above, as they receive the overwhelming majority of all search engine traffic.
The "reach" of a search engine is usually defined as the percentage of all Web users who visit the site at least once a month. Services, such as Nielsen//NetRatings, also periodically release statistics on the current reach of a search engine.
Another factor by which to judge a search engine is the percentage of Web pages it has indexed. Even the most comprehensive search engine was aware of no more than 16% of the estimated 800 million pages on the Web, according to a study published in the July 8, 1999, scientific journal Nature.
"The amount of information being indexed (by commonly used search engines) is increasing, but it's not increasing as fast as the amount of information that is being put on the Web," according to Steve Lawrence, a researcher at NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J.
Even the pages that do end up indexed take an average of six months to be discovered by the search engines, according to the study. That study was a long time ago in "Internet time." The situation is much worse today. Thus, you can not wait for the search engines to find your site. You have to submit it to them.
When people look for things of interest to them on the Internet, they go to search engines and directories. A directory is a listing of category subject headings with Websites listed under the specific categories. You browse through (often called "drilling down") the categories until you find what you are looking for. Search engines, on the other hand, have a form in which you input keywords, and pages of results are displayed. The results are lists of Websites that pertain to the keywords you have used.
Search engines seek out and index Websites on the Internet according to keywords. When a user types a search phrase, a search engine scans its database and returns a list of successful matches to the request.
WHICH SEARCH ENGINES ARE IMPORTANT?
According to Nielsen//NetRatings, as of the date of this writing, search engine popularity within the top 25 online properties is as follows, with the most popular listed first:
Yahoo!, Google, Lycos, Go.com, Excite, InfoSpace, and Ask Jeeves.
HotBot, which has always been a very popular search engine, is now part of the Terra Lycos Network. Other search engines worth noting but not presently in the top 25 online properties are Northern Light and LookSmart.
Thus, although there are thousands of search engines, you can narrow your main focus down to just those mentioned above, as they receive the overwhelming majority of all search engine traffic.
The "reach" of a search engine is usually defined as the percentage of all Web users who visit the site at least once a month. Services, such as Nielsen//NetRatings, also periodically release statistics on the current reach of a search engine.
Another factor by which to judge a search engine is the percentage of Web pages it has indexed. Even the most comprehensive search engine was aware of no more than 16% of the estimated 800 million pages on the Web, according to a study published in the July 8, 1999, scientific journal Nature.
"The amount of information being indexed (by commonly used search engines) is increasing, but it's not increasing as fast as the amount of information that is being put on the Web," according to Steve Lawrence, a researcher at NEC Research Institute in Princeton, N.J.
Even the pages that do end up indexed take an average of six months to be discovered by the search engines, according to the study. That study was a long time ago in "Internet time." The situation is much worse today. Thus, you can not wait for the search engines to find your site. You have to submit it to them.
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