When I started my e-business,
I ask 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 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?
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 "bot", crawls the web
and provides updates to 's index about once
a month.
.com began as an academic search engine.
, 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. 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 .
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 .
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 , 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).
Inktomi
Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as
they powered the secondary search database that
had driven Yahoo. Since then, Yahoo as switched to
using as their secondary search and backend
database, however Inktomi is just as popular now,
as they were several years ago, if not more so.
Their spiders are named "Slurp", and different
versions of Slurp crawls the web many different
times throughout the month, as Inktomi powers many
sites search results. There isn't much more to
Inktomi then that. Slurp puts heavy weight on
Title and description tags, and will rarely deep
crawl a site. Slurp usually only spider’s pages
that are submitted to its index.
Inktomi provides results to a number of sites.
Some of these are America Online, MSN, Hotbot,
Looksmart, About, Goto, CNet, Geocities, NBCi, ICQ
and many more.
Lycos
Lycos is one of the oldest search engines on
the Internet today, next to Altavista and Yahoo.
Their spider, named "T-Rex", crawls the web and
provides updates to the Lycos index from time to
time. The FAST crawler provides results for Lycos
in addition to its own database.
The Lycos crawler does not weigh META tags too
heavily, instead it relies on its own ranking
algorithm to rank pages returned in results. The
URL, META title, text headings, and word frequency
are just a few of the methods Lycos uses to rank
pages. Lycos does support pages with Frame
content. However, any page that isn't at least 75
words in content is not indexed.
Excite
Excite has been around the web for many years
now. Much more of a portal than just simply a
search engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular
search engine, until companies such as
seemed to have dominated the search engine market.
As of recently, Excite no longer accepts
submissions of URL's, and appears to no longer
spider. To get into the Excite search results, you
need to be either listed with Overture or Inktomi.
Looksmart
Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean
getting a good amount of traffic to your site.
Looksmart's results appear in many search engines,
including AltaVista, MSN, CNN, and many others.
Looksmart has two options to submit your site.
If your site is generally non-business related,
you can submit your site to Zeal (Looksmart's
sister site), or if you are a business, you can
pay a fee to have your site listed. Either method
will get you listed in Looksmart and its partner
sites if you are approved.
Once you have submitted your site, and it is
approved for listing it will take up to about 7
days for your site to be listed on Looksmart and
its partner sites.
AOL Search
America Online signed a multiyear pact with
for Web search results and accompanying
ad-sponsored links, ending relationships with
pay-for-performance service Overture Services and
Inktomi, its algorithmic search provider of nearly
three years.
Ok, now you have got a better understanding of
search engine’s game and finally you come to know
which search engine is best for you and which one
is leading in today's Internet World. In nutshell,
the thing which every e-entrepreneur wants is Top
Search Engine Ranking. Isn't it right? So take
some time to register with these search engines as
soon as possible and watch the traffic grow.