Faq's
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Search Engine Faqs:
How they operate and what Search Engines and Directories actually do is a mystery to most companies and an ongoing struggle for those that stay in the race to effectively position web sites. Here's some brief facts that you ought to keep in mind.
Indexing:
- According to Inktomi, publicly indexable Web contains over 1 billion pages on nearly 5 million Web servers. According to The Clever Project, the number of pages grows by approximately 1 million each day.
- Today, there are more than 170 million Web users up from 130 million just a few years ago. Approximately 85 percent of those users are turning to search engines to locate information online.
- Search engines consistently turn up among the top 10 most-visited sites on the Web. Sites like Yahoo!, Northern Light, AltaVista, and Lycos have become leading Web sites because they offer users the ability to navigate the vast amount of information available on the hundreds of millions of Web pages.
- Search engines do not index sites equally, may not index new pages for months, and no engine indexes more than about 16 percent of the Web. (Steve Lawrence, C. Lee Giles, Accessibility of Information on the Web? Nature, July 1999, p. 107.)
Differences:
- Yahoo!, Inktomi, LookSmart, About.com and SNAP.com are not true search engines, but directories with pay per submissions.
- Search engines vary within two distinct groups. Text-based search engines and data based search engines. There are several variations between the two, and they search your web site differently. See the Empire's article, "Whose Who? What's the Difference?" for more information.
- Web site submissions are usually free with true search engines. Directories are pay-per-submissions. Meaning to even be listed, you must first pay for a submission to be reviewed. This does not guarantee that you will then be listed.
- More and more, search engines are offering unique text-based avenues for buying advertising listings. Some search engines allow paid placement and some do not. Hence, you pay for your placement in the search results.
- Most of the web is searched and listed by a few of the conglomerate companies. Overture owns Yahoo, MSN, AltaVista and others, while Google has AOL, AskJeeves and a few others. The majority of the sites on the net are searched by these top engines. Now each of these sites are using Paid Inclusion as the primary way of listing sites.
Contact Empire to learn more about web positioning, search engine optimization and how to better position your site for optimal result standings.
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