The major search engines like Google and Yahoo are used by most for the majority of searches however there are occasions when you want to search deeper than just keyword articles—when you want comprehensive, factual, and/or specialized information. This is where you use the different alternative search engines out there—the ones that have something a little different to offer. Let’s take a look at a few of the different alternative search engines:
Factbites.com. Have you ever been searching for the facts on a topic? This is not the copywriting or sales pitches but the facts. They use a different way of displaying search results in that the descriptions are not taken from the web page meta descriptions but are written in a format that gives descriptive information of what the site is about. In fact, they claim that in some cases you could get your research information just from the descriptions and never have to leave the results page.
Gigablast.com. One useful feature that is different about this search engine is the option on the side tool bar to limit the aging on the search results. How many times have you searched for information only to find that it was a little too old to be reliable? With the Gigablast alternative search engine you can filter searches by last day, month, week, year, or customize by a date range. What they call “freshness dating” also allows ranking of search engine results by their recent status instead of standard PageRanking.
Snap.com. This is another mega search engine with a focus on image searching. When you use the image search, you are shown the results in a previewer that browses through the set rather quickly. Snap.com has another feature that allows you to quickly preview the home pages of web sites found in your search results without having to go to that page. This is in their web enhanced mode.
Info.com. This search engine combines results from the big 5: Google, Yahoo, Live.com, Ask.com, and About.com. Even the sponsored links by paying advertisers are combined.
Clusty.com. This is another alternative search engine that combines its results from the others however this one clusters the results by additional suggested searches. It is similar to what a tool like Adwords.google.com would do with its other keyword search suggestions. The difference is that these clustered suggestions are linked to websites. The clustering categories are listed down the left-hand side of the results page.
Mahalo.com. This alternative search engine is in beta however the idea is unique. Mahalo’s focus is to rid searches from the spam of low-quality websites and provide only the most relative and informative results. Mahalo has a team of editors that take the search terms people use and gather the most relevant websites associated with them. They manually write these customized results pages. If it has not yet written a custom results page for a set of keywords, it lists results from all of the major search engines on one tabbed table.
Exalead.com. This alternative search engine also gives preview thumbnails of the web page referenced in the search results. Along the right-hand side of the results page, you have a menu of various ways to narrow your search results.
Tags: alternatives, search engines
So who are the “who’s who” or major players among the search engines? Who are the innovators and the self-made entrepreneurs that took a function like searching and made millions and in some cases billions of dollars from it? Let’s take a quick look at a few of them:
Larry Page: He and Sergey Brin are the founders of the Google search engine. This “who’s who” is also on the corporate board of directors of the company. The entire concept of the Google search engine started as Page’s research project after entering a Ph.D. program at Stanford University. The research project was named “Backrub” and set out to establish a relationship between the backlinks to a given web page and its importance leading to what we know today as PageRank. In 2006, he was listed in Forbes Magazine as a “who’s who” holding a net worth of $18.5 Billion which at the time made him number 26 of the world’s wealthiest people.
Dr. Eric Schmidt: He is also a “who’s who” on the corporate board of the Google search engine. He was hired in 2001 by Google and currently is the CEO of the search engine giant. Dr. Schmidt has become a billionaire through sales of Google stock as its prices soared. Dr. Schmidt is also on the corporate board of Apple which has created a favorable relationship between the search engine and the major computer and software manufacturer.
Sergey Brin: He is the second founder of Google and is one of the “who’s who” that is also on the Google search engine corporate board. Sergey is Russian-born from Moscow. He holds a Bachelor of Computer Science from the University of Maryland, College Park, a Master’s Degree in Computer Science from Stanford, and started Ph.D. studies at Stanford. Both Sergey and Larry Page held a common interest in the internet and the ability to mine huge amounts of data.
Jerry Yang: He is the founder of Yahoo. He currently serves as the corporate Chairman, CEO, and Chief of the Yahoo search engine. He is another extremely wealthy “who’s who” in search engines having a net worth of $2.3 billion in 2008. He was born in Taipei, Taiwan and immigrated to the United States with his mother at the age of 10. Together with David Filo, they created the original Yahoo then known as “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web.” They did this while studying at Stanford and in 1995 the two of them left their Ph.D. studies and incorporated as the Yahoo search engine.
David Filo: He is the other founder of Yahoo and is a “who’s who” listed with Forbes magazine as the #73 on the Forbes 400 list of the wealthiest people in 2005. He runs the technical operational functions and is co-chief with Jerry Yang. He is originally from Moss Bluff, Louisiana and holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering from Tulane University, a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and left his Ph.D. studies in electrical engineering at Stanford to start Yahoo.
Gary Flake: He is one of the “who’s who” with Microsoft and the Live search engine. He is a technical fellow at Microsoft and is responsible for Live Labs and the future of Microsoft in the area of search, desktop search, and commercial search engine technologies. Prior to coming on board at Microsoft, he founded Yahoo research labs. He also directed the corporate research and development initiatives at Yahoo.
Tags: corporations, search engine
Having your web page crack or rank in the Google top 10 is a position coveted by most web site owners. The principle behind this that most who are searching, will only browse the first page and maybe the second page of a search engine’s query results. So search engine optimization consultants try various methods to crack the top 10 of the Google search engine and the challenge is complicated by the fact that Google is always changing its ranking algorithms. So how do you increase your chances of cracking the Google top 10? Let’s look at a few ways:
You will reach the top 10 quicker with low competitive keywords. But it is less likely that more traffic will reach you unless your keywords are publicized by other means. Let’s use as an example the search phrase “legitimate work at home jobs.” If you run the phrase “work at home” through Wordtracker’s free keyword analysis site (http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com), you will find that one of the results will be “legitimate work at home jobs” and it is towards the top because this phrase is used often to search. It is what we call competitive. Competitive keyword phrases take longer to crack the top 10 in the Google search engine.
However if you scan down the keyword results, you’ll notice towards the bottom or what we call the search tail a phrase “legitamite work at home.” The word legitimate is misspelled but people actually use it for a search and its competitiveness factor is low because it is at the end of the search tail. You could actually crack the top 10 in the Google search engine by placing content on your web page that exploits the phrase “legitamite work at home” and getting backlinks from other ranked web sites that use the exact misspelling too. You can really lower the competitiveness factor and crack the top 10 in the Google search engine by targeting a keyword phrase “legitamite work at home in Detroit” if that happens to be your location.
Get plenty of quality backlinks. You could have the best targeted keyword content but you are not going to crack the Google top 10 without getting plenty of links back to your web page from other web pages. And the links back to your site should come from web sites related to your web page’s niche. For example, you might have a web site that offers computer tips. The keyword phrase “computer tips” is very competitive so the way that you increase your chances of cracking the Google top 10 is to have other computer-related web sites place a link to your web site on their pages.
You can determine how many web sites are linking to yours. Go to another search engine, Yahoo, at www.yahoo.com and type in the following phrase at the search query entry field: linkdomain:www. -site:www.. Replace with the domain name of your web site and Yahoo will return every the location of every web page with a link back to yours.
Keep expectations in check. So many are obsessed with cracking the top 10 in the Google search engine. First of all, if your keyword phrase is in a highly-competitive domain, it will take months to crack the top 10 in the Google search engine. Second, your business goal should not be to crack the top 10 in the Google search engine but to convert visits to your website into profitable sales. You don’t just want visits. You want quality visits that help your bottom line.
Tags: Google, search engine rankings, top 10
The Live Search Engine is Microsoft’s upgrade for what used to be only the MSN search. The Live search engine is predicted to undergo even more enhancements so as to gain a greater share of the search engine market now dominated by Google. Of course the Live search engine has adequate search facilities but let’s take a look at some more of its interesting features:
The video search feature: Most search engines have the ability to search for videos however the Live search engine has a different sort of feature. When you do a video search, you are shown a panel with the thumbnails of the different videos matching your query. With the Live search engine, all you have to do is hover the mouse over the thumbnail of the video and it starts playing so you can preview.
Slider bar for re-sizing image thumbnails: This is one of the Live search engine features that makes it handy for image searches. Browsing for images can sometimes be a tedious process as web pages can only fit so many fixed-size thumbnails on one page at a time. With the Live search engine, you are shown a slider bar where you can zoom out on the image page thus reducing the size of the thumbnails. This allows you to fit more thumbnails on one page and reduces the need to do several next page/previous page steps.
Search macros: One of the features of the Live search engine that sets it apart from others is the ability to define search macros. A macro by definition is a sequence of steps used to arrive at some result that is recorded for later use. Live search macros are useful for saving those special search queries you used to arrive at the desired search results. Not only can you record your own search macros, you can use some of Live’s preprogrammed public macros too.
Windows Live Toolbar: Like other search engines, Microsoft offers the Windows Live Toolbar to integrate into your web browser providing a way to quickly access the search engine’s features. The problem with Windows Live Toolbar is that it can only integrate with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 and above. It excludes other web browsers like Mozilla Firefox thereby excluding a significant number of users who prefer and exclusively use them. One interesting feature of the Windows Live Toolbar is its extending text highlighting functionality. When you are on a page and highlight items such as a phone number or an address, a menu appears where you can look up the map to the location, dial the telephone number, or get the weather at the location.
The Live Search browser plug-in: There is a browser enhancement that will work with Mozilla Firefox and that is the Live search engine browser plug-in. Installing this plug-in creates a search window in the browser but what is different about this one is that when you click on the left icon a drop down menu appears allowing you to pick several different sites to search. For example, you can choose to search EBay, Google, Yahoo, and others from this drop down menu.
The future: Microsoft has been for some time setting its sights on becoming an even greater competitor to Google and the search engine market. This is why the company put in a bid to take over and buy out Yahoo. With the acquisition of Yahoo, it will combine both search engines into one that leverages all of their strong features—especially the mobile features of the acquired company.
Tags: Microsoft Live, search engine
Yahoo has been in the news lately because of a Microsoft bid to purchase it. The result of this would be a combining of the Yahoo and Live search engines. It is understandable why Microsoft would want to buy Yahoo with all of its features and its long history of providing search capabilities to the internet community. Yahoo has been around since 1994. It was one of the major search engines on the internet before Google. It is a total information portal and its search results are comparative to Google’s. What are some of the features of Yahoo that make it so desirable for Microsoft to want to latch onto? Let’s look at a few of them here:
To understand the Microsoft bid, you have to understand the trend. When you really size up the internet search engines today, you can see that it’s all about advertising. That’s where the money is made. Most software that will ever be developed is developed. Any teenager can develop a web site so there is really no money there. People don’t like to pay to see content and the certainly don’t like to pay for subscriptions to sites. Plus, there is stiff competition between developers of paid software and open source software. It’s the advertising that companies compete over. And targeted advertising on the internet wants to show you ads as quickly as possible in order to encourage impulse buying. What better way to encourage impulse buying than to show ads in as many places as possible and the best place is through a search engine and a mobile device.
The Yahoo search engine has a clear advantage in the mobile realm. This is one of the features it has developed over time that has surpassed the Google search engine. However Google focuses on searching and not mobile as its main priority. Google does have its mobile version of search and Gmail. So, since most software that will ever be developed is developed, Microsoft would want to shift away from software to developing applications and content delivery systems. The search engine already has an excellent suite of mobile applications through Yahoo Go and its gallery of mobile widgets.
Yahoo has an extensive gallery of mobile widgets. You not only use Yahoo Go to search for information from your cell phone. You also have applications allowing you to monitor your Ebay activity, access MTV news, and access your Myspace social network. And you don’t have to be at a computer to do it. Other widgets include photo sharing with Flickr, accessing your e-mail, news, weather, sports, and finance. A developer knows that integrating widgets into mobile applications is never simple but Yahoo provides a free system developer’s kit (SDK) to ease the task. Microsoft’s purchase of the Yahoo search engine would give it rights to these mobile widgets for leveraging and upgrading.
And the search engine services don’t just stop at mobile. You have video searches, subscriptions search allowing access to information not normally accessed by search engines, and travel search. You can get news alerts on your mobile device. You have an online bookmark organizer with MyWeb. You can find a job with Yahoo Hotjobs. And there are many more services. The list is quite extensive but it is obvious that Microsoft will get a very good deal by purchasing Yahoo.
Tags: mobile, search engine, Yahoo!
If you have been around search engines for any length of time, you have probably heard of the Google PageRank for a particular web page. The Google PageRank is a measure on a scale of 0 to 10 of a web page’s importance as compared to other web pages. It is also important to note that web pages are ranked and not entire web sites. Of course a page with a higher Google PageRank will appear towards the top of a search engine’s results listing. Think of it as a popularity contest. The sites with the highest PageRank are likely going to be the ones you see first when doing a Google search on its keywords. Many search engine optimization specialists try to figure out just exactly how Google ranks its pages but the algorithm is proprietary and not every detail is known. Plus, Google can change its ranking algorithm at any time it wants. What this means for you is that you understand that search engine optimization is never a one-time process. Google uses around 100 different metrics to rank web pages. Let’s look at some of the most important criteria that Google uses to establish PageRank:
External web pages pointing to your web page are important to ranking. To simply put it, the more pages that point to your site, the more popular the Google search engine deems your site is. However this metric does not guarantee a high PageRank for your web page in and of itself. The quality of the links pointing back to your web site is evaluated as well. Pages that link to your pages with higher page rankings are weighted as more important by Google.
Use keywords in the anchor text of the links to your pages. This goes for your own internal pages as well as the external pages. The Google search engine places more weight on links to your page containing your targeted keywords.
Make sure your web pages contain at least 200 words of relevant content. The Googlebot will “read” your web pages and classify it according the keywords it finds and you focus on. Remember to always write for people and not just for search engines as this is what will keep visitors coming back to your site.
Don’t try to get links too fast. Don’t strive to get links back to your web pages at an extremely fast rate because the Google search engine might determine that you are trying to what they call “spam” the internet. There’s nothing wrong with making several posts each day to your favorite forum or blogging sites however it is quite different if you are able to generate an excessive amount. An excessive amount would be a total number of links that could only be generated by machine methods or link farms. It’s not to say that your web page will get blacklisted but it will raise suspicion.
The older your web pages are the better. It’s almost as if new web pages are put into something that mimics a probationary state by the Google search engine. That’s why you should not waste any time getting your web site online as long as it is complete.
Update your site regularly. This is where content management systems like WordPress can be a definite advantage because you can add new content easily everyday if you like. The Googlebot evaluates that if a web page is constantly changing then it must be important thus it gets more weight towards the PageRank.
Remember the times when you had to submit your URL to SEs? It appears that Google, Yahoo! and others are aware of your new domain the moment you create it.
Take this website as an example. Whois record shows the following:
Domain Name: SEOWARRIOR.NET
Updated Date: 17-nov-2008
Creation Date: 14-nov-2008
Expiration Date: 14-nov-2010
Without adding my URL to any SEs, just a few days later web spiders started crawling my site.
Visitors included:
crawl-66-249-73-89.googlebot.com (Google)
llf531386.crawl.yahoo.net (Yahoo)
copilot.thunderstone.com (Thunderstone)
I have not added this domain’s URL to any of the above search engines!!
Search Engines are becoming more powerful by day. Depending on your specific circumstances, this behavior may be wanted. For websites that are still being built this may be something you may want to prohibit. Simply create a robots.txt file to disallow all web spiders from crawling your site. Simply create robots.txt file with the following entries:
# disallow all spiders for entire website
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Note: keep in mind that some spiders may still crawl your website as they are not honoring the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP).
Tags: add url, search engines
Google enjoys the title of being the strongest and most popular search engine on the internet. However most know that there are competitors looking to gain that position too. And there are times, although not often, that Google is not available and the other search engine competitors might have to be used. Here are some of Google’s most significant competitors:
Yahoo: Yahoo is also a portal so when you go to its main page at www.yahoo.com, you will also see other information like news, sports, free e-mail, and entertainment. Yahoo has a search engine database plus its own directory. Yahoo has been in the news recently because of a Microsoft bid to merge with the company.
Live Search: Live search is Microsoft’s implementation of its own search engine. It was formerly known as MSN search. One interesting feature of Live Search not found on Google is the video search. You can search on videos by keywords and the result will be a several frames per page of the different videos found. However what is unique is that all you have to do is roll the mouse over the frame of the video and it automatically plays. This has a distinct advantage over other video sharing sites where an embedded player must load and buffer the video in order to play it.
Live Search uses a minimum of advertisements however it does have sponsored sites (paid ads) and they are listed down the right-hand side of the screen. Also along the right-hand side of the screen is the list of related searches.
Ask: This search engine was formerly known as Ask Jeeves. It is a Google competitor that includes paid ad results from Google’s AdWords database. Unlike its competitor Google, when you enter a search engine query on Ask the results are returned in three columns. The very left is the entry area for your search query. You will notice that you have options to narrow your search or expand your search—something the competitor Google does not have. Plus, while you are typing into the search engine query field, you are automatically fed a list of other related search ideas which can be very useful. Google has a search ideas feature but it usually is found on the Google toolbar and not online. You will also notice that advertisements are minimal however sponsored results are mixed in with the search results.
Ask purposely moves extraneous information that is helpful but not essential to the third rightmost column. The rightmost column contains thumbnails of related images, the related Wikipedia definition pertaining to your search keyword, and the related definition from the American Heritage® Dictionary. Basically the third column enhances the search engine results related to the search keywords entered.
The Ask search engine has a well-developed user portal that gives registered users the ability to save bookmarks and organize them into folders with the click of a button. With the click of another button you can save the bookmark to a web page and add a note to it. Another user function allows you to save all the images of a web page with one click of another button. What is really handy is as you scroll down search results, an icon appears allowing you to save the location of the page. And as you scroll, if any result has a binoculars icon, you can just hover the mouse over it and see a small preview of the page—something else the competitor Google does not have.
Tags: competition, Google, search engines
Just like a traditional business when you open your doors you have to let someone know you exist. It is the same way when you put your business or personal website online for the first time. You have to let the search engines know about it by submitting the uniform resource locator (URL) to the search engine submission area which requests it to be added to their index. This submission process also includes submitting your page to the numerous directories so that you can get back links to your web site and rank higher with Google. Let’s look at some ways to submit your page to search engines and directories:
Start with the most popular websites. You will first want to make a list and order it by the significance of the search engine. For example, Google and Yahoo would probably be at the top of your list because they are the largest and span the greatest web presence.
Submitting your web page to Google is easy. Just go to Google.com/addurl. You only need to supply the URL to the top level page. The Googlebot will take that top level page and branch out from there discovering the remaining pages.
Ask.com supports the Sitemap protocol. Sitemap protocol is described at sitemap.org. A site map using the Sitemap protocol is an extended markup language (XML) file with a specific structure describing all of the pages associated with a particular web site. It is a way to enhance discovery of all the web pages by the search engine crawler.
Yahoo has several paths. Go to search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html and you have choices for letting Yahoo know of your web site, a mobile web site, or media content. You can also submit products and travel promotions. This model is more designed to fit to Yahoo’s portal-style search engine.
Letting Live.com know of your pages is easy too. You can tell the search engine the location of your web page at search.live.com/docs/submit.aspx. It is like Google in that you only have to enter the URL of the top-level web page and the Live bots will find and index the rest.
Don’t use automated methods. Most of these sites where you enter your URL have graphical letters that must be entered as shown so as to ward of those who would try to automate the process.
What a pain this task can be. You not only need to give your web page URL to the major search engines. You need to submit it to the other directories for one-way links too. And there are literally hundreds of these directories. What typically happens is the submitter loses track of where he or she last submitted the URL for the site getting promoted and ends up doing double submissions. This is where a free online service like onewaytextlink.com comes in handy. Registration is free and it lists all the websites that will allow you to submit your article containing a link back to your web page or just the URL to it.
Don’t forget about DMOZ.org. The Open Directory Project or DMOZ.org has been around for many years and it is still the number one free web directory and the most important one for you to submit your web page to. Listing after submission on this directory is not automatic. Your web page has to be reviewed by human editors.
Tags: add page, add url, search engine
Picture yourself discovering the internet for the first time. You are connected, you open a web browser, and the web browser goes to the default home page. And there it sits. You might call your friends and ask what to do next not having a guide to use an internet search engine. You call your friends and ask them to guide you and they will tell you the address of a few of their favorite web sites but you want more. So you call your friends again and they guide you to something called a search engine. You go there and type in a few phrases of some items of interest and it returns lists of different web pages possibly containing the information you seek. Search engines guide you to find what you need from the internet. Let’s look at a few common features of them to guide you through search engine usage:
You should first know what search engines are available to you. These are your main ones: www.Google.com, www.Yahoo.com, www.Live.com, and www.Ask.com. There are other variations of these and some other search engines even use the databases of the main ones but you will find that most references on the internet will guide you to these main four and in most cases Google or Yahoo.
A search engine is connected to a database. And it only stands to reason that the larger the database, the more “hits” you will have for most search queries you enter. The term “hits” means that every time the words you type into the search query window match with the words found in the context of a document, they are listed on what is called a results page in your browser window.
The results page is a like a guide allowing you to click on each hit found. What is displayed for each hit is the title of the web page, a short description, and the link to it. When you click on one of the hits, you are guided to that web page.
The internet search engine does not actually search the entire internet. That would take entirely too long. What happens is when you type in your search query the process is guided to the search engine’s massive indexed database. The index is built on the words (what are called keywords) that occur the most frequently in a document.
So how does a web page get indexed? People want to guide you to their web pages because they have something important, something entertaining, or something to sell. However you can put a web page up today and it will just sit there until one of the internet search engines finds it. Your page is found by what is known as a search “bot” (short for “robot”). A search bot is a software application that travels the web reading every page out there. When it reads a link on the web page, the link guides it to read the page referenced by it. The process takes many days each month and many computers divide up the overall task. When the search bot finds your page, it tries to determine which keywords occur most in it and then classifies it in its index database accordingly.
Tags: beginners, guide, search engine
