Webmaster Articles > Understanding the Game of Search Engines
Learn a little bit about the most popular search engines.
When I started my e-business, I asked my web-designer friend to make a site which is really brainstorming. He did me a great favor and really made an excellent site. My site's design is fabulous, it's graphics are mind blowing and coding is superb. But now what? What I seen in the coming days, I am not earning a single penny because no one is visiting my site.
I think for a while that why all this is happening, then I make a search on Yahoo and see the first site which is coming on the top. It doesn't have a good design like mine but still he is making good money. Then I came to know that the site's design is meaningless if site's ranking on search engines is not good.
When it comes to search engine every ear just not hears it but listens it's every aspect and try to locate it's presence in his site. Well why not it be done as it is the place from where all of us get our business.
Every search engine has it's own criterion of ranking and it's clear from the fact that when you do a search on Yahoo or Google or any other search engines there results vary. Here is the listing of some of the Top Search Engines and a few noteworthy points about all of them. Know which engines get you more bangs for the buck?
Google has increased in popularity tenfold the past several years. They have gone from beta testing, to becoming the Internet's largest index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider, affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls the web and provides updates to Google's index about once a month.
Google.com began as an academic search engine. Google, by far, has a very good algorithm of ranking pages returned from a result, probably one of the main reasons it has become so popular over the years. Google has several methods which determine page rank in returned searches.
Yahoo
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and portals on the Internet today, and the site went live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited directory, and provides secondary search results using Google.
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators around, as far as web directories and search engines go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of the most difficult to get listed in, unless of course you pay to submit your site. Even if you pay it doesn't guarantee you will get listed.
Either way, if you suggest a URL, it is "reviewed" by a Yahoo! editor, and if approved will appear in the next index update.
AltaVista
Many who have access to web logs may have seen a spider named 'scooter' accessing their pages. Scooter used to be AltaVista's robot. However, since the Feb 2001 site update, a newer form of Scooter is now crawling the web. Whichever spider AltaVista uses, it is one of the largest search engines on the net today, next to Google.
It will usually take several months for AltaVista to index your entire site, although the past few months scooter hasn't been deep crawling too well. Unlike Google, AltaVista will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes a good amount of time to index your site depending on how large your site is.
AltaVista gets most of its results from its own index, however they do pull the top 5 results of each search from Overture (formerly Goto).
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