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Last Update: 05/09/2006
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Search
Engine - an automated search system as opposed to one that is
compiled by human editors. When an internet user types a search phrase into the
search box of a search engine, powerful software scans the search engines
database for words that match the users query. Each search engine has its own
unique criteria for deciding on the relevance of the pages contained in its
database to the search query which is the reason why searches for the same query
brings different results from each search engine, even though the contents of
their databases may be almost identical. Examples of search engines are Google,
AltaVista and Lycos.
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Directory
- a human compiled directory of websites.. When a site is submitted to a
directory such as Yahoo, it is visited by a human editor, who then decides
whether the site is suitable for inclusion, under which category it will be
listed and even the title and description that will be displayed on the results
page. It follows that it is much more difficult to manipulate rankings on a
directory than it is with an automated search engine but on the other hand,
results are usually more relevant than those returned by automated systems.
Examples of directories are Yahoo, DMOZ
and LookSmart.
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Spider
- not the hairy kind, a spider (or crawleer) is the name given to computer
software used by search engines to analyze or "spider" pages on the
world wide web. The spiders roam the web following links and indexing the pages
found. This is one reason why reciprocal links from other websites are so
important when promoting a site. Theoretically at least it should not be
necessary to submit a site to a search engine, the spider should find it
eventually on its own, but in reality the web is growing at such a rate that
they are always playing catch up. Spiders often go by such inventive names as 'Scooter',
'Googlebot', 'Gulliver',
' Winona Spider' etc.
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