Search Engines

Services | Optimisation (SEO) | Search Engines

How search engines work

Search engines are the cornerstone technology of the Internet as we know it today. It is the technology we use to find websites and navigate the Internet. They find information on the Internet and index it to make web pages searchable.

Internet Search engines are web-based systems that use web crawlers or spiders, also known as bots, to scan web pages and collect information about the web page's content. This information determines how the site will be indexed or catalogued within the search engine's servers. This is the point where search engine optimisation is most important.

The index is what is searched when a search query is made. The engine goes into the catalogue to retrieve websites, listing what it judges to be the most relevant to the query first. Clicking on a link from a result page will take you to the live version of the site, as served from the website's server - not the indexed information.

To have a web page indexed, it is best to submit the page directly to the search engine. Crawlers will then be instructed to look for your site to scan the contents and catalogue it. If the site is updated regularly it can be crawled several times a day to keep the index updated.

Working with search engines

The challenge in working with search engines is that no one outside these search engine companies, and probably very few people inside, know how these systems fully operate and rank web pages. Attractum™ continually researches and experiments to build knowledge of what we know about search engines. We use this information to optimise our client's sites better than our competitiors and build robust mixed media marketing strategies.

Search is now a multibillion dollar industry with the biggest names of the Internet; Microsoft, Google and Yahoo! wrestling to manage and organise the world's information.

Google

The worlds largest and most popular search engine began in 1995. Google aims to "organise all of the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". Its success is attributed to the speed and accuracy of the search results it returns. These qualities make it the most sought after search engine to be ranked on.

Google generates the bulk of its revenue through advertising programs, AdWords and AdSense.

AdSense is an advertising program that implements contextual advertising by placing ads on AdSense participating websites. The publishers receive a percentage of the pay-per-click revenue generated by displaying the ad. Almost anyone with a website can join AdSense.

Other Google products include: Google Chrome, Google Toolbar, Google Maps, Google Earth, Blogger and Gmail.

Be aware of people that claim to know how Google works. Google does not reveal how its search engine operates. This would be detrimental to its business. SEO professionals will only know parts of how Google reads websites and returns search results from their own experience, testing and analysis in attempt to reveal more of Google's algorithms.

Yahoo!

Formally the largest search directory and portal on the Internet; it began implementing web crawlers only in 2002. These human-edited directories became impractical as the Internet grew and continues to do so unmanageably. Yahoo! Search was finally introduced at this time in an effort to introduce a true online search capability that Google had already implemented to dominate the industry.

Yahoo! has the world's second largest search engine with a 11% share of the market as of December 2008. It survived the dot-com bubble burst following 2000 and has since made a number of acquisitions and additions to its services including Overture, Flickr, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Messenger.

Microsoft as made several attempts to merge/acquire Yahoo! None have yet been successful.

MSN - Live

Microsoft's search engine, live.com - the default engine for Internet Explorer - formerly attracted a high proportion of search queries under 'MSN Search'. This service failed to keep up with developments in the search engine industry and continued a decline, maintaining itself by outsourcing its index from other search engines.

It was re-launched as 'Live Search' in 2006. Together, MSN search and Live Search now hold approximately 4% of the search engine market share making it the third biggest.

MSN also has its own advertising program, Microsoft adCenter, to provide pay per click advertisements along side search results.

Services | Optimisation (SEO) | Search Engines