Search Engines Today

1. Search engines,
2. Directories.

Search Engines automatically ‘crawl’ web pages by following hyper links and store copies of them in an index, so that they can generate a list of resources according to user’s requests. Directories are compiled according to categories by humans who are site owners or directory editors.

The top13 search engines listed Below cover about 90 percent of all online searches performed on the Internet. Those search engines are:

• www.Google.com
• www.Yahoo.com
• www.MSN Search.com
• www.AOL Search.com
• www.AltaVista.com
• www.Lycos.com
• www.Netscape.com
• www.HotBot.com
• Ask Jeeves/Teoma
• www.AllTheWeb.com
• www.Wisenut.com
• www.iWon.com

Visit Google, Yahoo, MSN or one of the lesser search engines, and you get a few million results for just about any search term. Despite this impressive depth of results, most users consider only a few of the WebPages being pointed to. A lot of research indicates that most searchers exit search engine result pages to visit one of the top three results.

Although search engines today are more sophisticated – and there are more websites to compete with – today’s technology allows for more relevant search results. Today’s search engines are more sophisticated than years ago; now they are better able to recognize quality, and are not so easily fooled into ranking dubious websites.

The likelihood that someone fools a search engine into providing his website an unfairly high ranking has diminished, and the likelihood of searchers finding the most relevant results has increased. How was this achieved, and how then can we increase the chances of our website to be listed?

The answer, quite simply, is by understanding how the search engines of today work.

As search engines become better and faster, there is a need for a human touch to search results. In this constant struggle between spammy (scammy?) search engine optimizers and search engine engineers, the searcher can be the victim.