Search Engines

What is a Search Engine?

A search engine is a computer program that

1. Uses a proprietary and sophisticated algorithm to search a large collection of documents in a data base
2. that contains the keywords (that were entered by the person doing the searching)
3. and returns a list of documents that contain one or more of the keywords, to the searcher.

Each search engine uses a slightly different algorithm which is usually tweaked regularly to make them more efficient and to stay ahead of the competition by doing a better job of searching and getting results. 

These algorithms are tightly held business secrets so no one knows exactly how they work but based on search engine "tips" that some of the SE Websites list, we can get an idea of what "will and will not" work.

What is Search Engine Optimization?

When people use search engines, even though their search results may fetch them thousands of Websites and Web pages, most will view only the first 30 to 50 links.  Some people don't even go beyond the first page or two, so getting a good ranking by the search engines makes your site more visible to people and will help them find it.  Good ranking are even more important for businesses on the Web.

When a Web Page ranks high in the results of a search query it's not an accident.  This happens because of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

SEO sounds like something you do to a search engine to help it find your site, but that's not the case.  Nothing happens to a search engine during optimization, the optimization is done to Web pages.  Optimization is the process of editing and updating your Web pages so they will be thoroughly crawled by a Web spider and that they will be constructed in a way that will help you get high rankings by the search engines.

The basic fundamentals of SEO works for all search engines but there are some differences between how the different spiders crawl sites and how the different search engines return results.  SEO will be covered in more detail in the lesson on Search Engine Optimization.

SEO Elite is one of the best SEO tools available that will help you with Off-Page Optimization.  I personally use it and highly recommend it. It gives you helpful information in just seconds that would normally take you hours to find out manually.  It comes with a 60 day money-back guarantee.

As you can see, the pages of this website are not filled with tons of advertisements.
I only recommend quality products, no junk, no scams.  Most of the products that I recommend, I have bought myself.  If they are products that cost something, then they are well worth the money, otherwise I would not recommend them.

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Search Engine Popularity

If you want Web users to find your Website, then you want to be listed with the major search engines. 

• Search engines and directories average more than  300 million searches a day and they are the main way Internet users find Websites. 
• U.S. Web users performed 7.3 billion searches in April of 2007, 11 percent more than a year earlier.
• The number of U.S. Web search queries has grown 30 percent since December of 2005,
• Almost 90 percent of all Internet searchers use the top three search sites:
  Google, Yahoo! and MSN.

ComScore Inc, the independent online audience measurement firm, released data in October 2007, showing that:

1. Google Inc. was the Web search leader and held 49.7 percent of the U.S. search market.
2. ComScore's data also showed that Yahoo Inc., the No. 2-ranked Web search provider, had a U.S. search share of 26.8 percent
3. The No. 3-ranked search provider, Microsoft Corp., held on to a 10.3 percent share.
4. Ask.com held 5.1 percent of the U.S market
5. AOL held 5.0 percent.

ComScore Inc. releases data monthly and is the most widely accepted measure of the Web search market competition.

So you can see that Google is the "Big Hitter" when it comes to search engines.  Getting listed in Google will get you listed in other key places since many of the smaller search engines get their results from the large search engines.

In the next topic on Search Engine Spiders, I tell you how the spiders compliment and work with the search engines to make your queries work.

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