Before you get started trying to optimize for the search engines, you should understand the basic landscape. What is a search engine, anyway? What’s a directory? Which one is most important? The following points provide an overview of search engines:
The search engine landscape consists of search sites, search systems, search engines, and search directories.
A search site is a Web site where you can search. Google, AOL, and Yahoo! are search sites.
Many search sites get their data from other companies. Google, for example, is a search system that feeds data to AOL and many other sites.
A search engine is a system that indexes individual pages inside Web sites, whereas a search directory is a collection of information about particular Web sites; it doesn’t index pages inside those sites, it just contains basic information about each site. You can find one of the oldest and most important search directories at http://dir.Yahoo.com/.
The three most important search sites are Google, Yahoo!, and MSN/Bing.
Both Google and Yahoo! allow you to search using both search engines (www.Google.com and www.Yahoo.com) and search directories (http://dir.Google.com/ and http://dir.Yahoo.com/). MSN/Bing provides only a search engine.
Google and MSN/Bing have their own search engines. However, Yahoo!’s search engine actually provides data from MSN/Bing; it no longer maintains a search engine index itself.
Google dwarfs all other search systems. Almost 66 percent of regular search engine searches occur on the Google search site. Add in the sites to which Google feeds search results (such as AOL.com, Earthlink.com, Comcast.net, and so on), and Google is responsible for a little over 70 percent of all searches.
MSN/Bing is responsible for around another 26 percent of searches, at www.Bing.com and, via the results it feeds to Yahoo!, at www.Yahoo.com.
Ask.com is often included in the list of the top search engines, but it’s responsible for only about 2 percent of searches.
Not all searches occur at regular “search engines”; people often search for information at video sites, social networking sites, online stores, and the like.
More searches carried out every month at www.YouTube.com than at Bing. And Craigslist.com, Facebook.com, eBay.com, and Amazon.com combined account for more than two billion searches every month — more than Bing. So if you sell products, focusing purely on the regular search engines may be a big mistake; a huge proportion of “product” searches are being carried out elsewhere.
dummies
Source:http://www.dummies.com/how-to/content/a-quick-look-at-the-search-engine-landscape.html
No comments:
Post a Comment