Tue 29 May 2007
All the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, and MSN Search are known as crawler-based search engines and there are three main parts to these. The spider, the index, and the search engine software.
- First the spider ‘crawls’ the web, reading pages and following the links on them to other pages. The spider will revisited sites on a regular basis to keep up with any changes that are made.
- Second all the web pages the spider discovers are indexed.
- Third when a person uses that search engine it applies search engine software to the index to rank all the indexed pages in order of what it considers to be the most relevant. The algorithm used in search engine software to determine this rank varies between different search engines, that’s why different search engines turn up different results.
Given the nature of how search engines find webpages, if your website has no in- bound links (that’s links from other websites to yours) your website may not turn up in search engine results. If you are having this problem you may like to consider submitting your site to be indexed. Here are the links to some of the major search engines submission pages.
Google - http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo - http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
AltraVista - http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/default
MSN Search - http://beta.search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx