When a website is made,the author is responsible for submitting the site to the different Search Engines. There are hundreds of search engines on the internet. Besides accepting submissions,some Search Engines use "spiders"--a program that searches the internet for new content which it then indexes and adds to the database. If you do a search on say,Alta Vista. The results include only websites registered with Alta Vista. If you want a full search of the internet you have to search every Directory and Search Engine out there. Also, each browser supports different Search Engines. For example,Internet Explorer's search page includes: Yahoo!,Alta Vista,Magellan,Starting Point,and Web Crawler. Netscape has different Search Engines. When you perform a search remember that you are only searching that specific database not the entire internet! For a more complete search of the internet you need to use more than one Search Engine and the other Browser,too.
When you submit a search query,the results include every page in that database that contains those exact words. If you submit:Search Engine,the results are 1. every page with the word "search" in it and 2. every page with the word "engine" in it. If you want information on Search Engines,you have to put quotes around the multiple words,this will treat it as a phrase. Your results will be fewer and more accurate.
A webmaster can control the keywords a site is displayed for by using "Meta Tags" and in some cases can specify the site description returned by the Search Engine.
Most Search Engines have a "help" link which gives all the information you need to effectively use their service. As unexciting as it is, I highly recommend reading these pages. It could save you hours of frustration.
| HOME |