Exercise 23 – Searching mechanisms
1. Spider is a software program, which would visit the web from link to link, locating and indexing the websites for the search engine such as Google or Yahoo. Function of spider are mainly to add and indexing new websites to the database of the search engines. In order to keep their database updated, spider would also revisit those existing links to update for their content.
2. Meta-search engine is a search engine, which would pass the search requests to various popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN etc. simultaneously for processing. Results from each search engineers would be consolidated and presented to the client grouped by their sourced search engines.
Dogpie www.dogpile.com, Mama www.mamma.com and Incrawler www.incrawler.com are some of meta-search engineers available from the Internet.
3. There following are several ways to get your sites listed in the search engines:-
a. Do nothing: The spider of the search engine would search and include your site into their database. However, it is not guaranteed on when your site would be included. However, I checked that my blog with updated page has been included in Google just within an hour after uploading.
b. Subscribe to search engine sites with annual subscription fees.
How could you improve your site ranking?
a. Some search engine sites, such as Google, would rank a page according to the number of links and quality of links leading to the pages. Therefore, if you manage to get more important websites linking to your site, the ranking of your site would improve.
b. Google would give more weight to the title of the website, those within the <Title> tags. Therefore using more meaningful title for your webpage would improve their ranking.
c. Similarly Google would index those webpage with image including ALT tags. Therefore, including ALT tags to the images of the webpage would also improve their ranking.
Reference
Berkeley, UC. (2008). Meta-search engines. Retrieved April25, 2008 from http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html.
Heng, C. (n.d.) How to improve your search engine ranking on Google. Retrieved April 28, 2008 from http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml.
TechTerms. (n.d.) Spider. Retrieved April 25, 2008 from http://www.techterms.com/definition/spidertechterms.com/definition/spider.
