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What Are Search Engines?

You are probably saying to yourself right now, "I know what a search engine is, it's what I use to find what I want on the internet." And you'd be right, but search engines are much more. What most people don't understand is that search engines are a very powerful marketing tool that if used correctly can bring you outstanding rewards. Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, lets find out what the different kinds of search engines are.

One type of search engine is the "crawler" or "robot" search engine. This is what most people think about when they hear the name "search engine". In essence what this type of engine does is follow links from one page to another indexing the contents of whatever it comes to. For many of these search engines it is not necessary to "submit" your site, since the idea is that one way or another all sites on the web are connected and your site will be found if given time.

A second type, and the second most thought of type of search engine, is a search directory. In essence this isn't a search engine at all. These types of search engines are usually man edited, meaning that someone will get your link and visit your site to see if it is good enough to be listed within their directory. These usually have categories for your site to be kept in, so that people can also browse for your listing instead of just searching for it.

Another type of search engine is a hybrid. These search engines are actually a mixture of the two above types, combining some directory listings with spidered listings. The idea of these search engines is that if both of the above systems work well, then combining them will work great. Usually these search engines are just shells that read the index from their partners and either re-index them to their specifications, or leave them how they are.

I mentioned a search engines "specifications". These "specifications" are actually mathematical algorithms which take different on page and off page criteria in order to decide for the "relevancy" or "usefulness" of your site. Unfortunately I can't go into too much detail about what these criteria are within the frame or this article, especially since each search engine has a different algorithm. These criteria range from the number of words in your title to how many links you have on your page, and make note that more is not always better.

I hope that we have been able to answer some questions you may have had about what a search engine actually is and a little bit about how it works. If you have any questions you can send us an
E-mail and we'll answer your question as promptly as possible.