Introductions of Search Engines

Aug 13, 2008

The world of internet changes every second. I got to know the power of search engines when I was not working in this area.

Basically, there are two kinds of search engines: crawler-based robots and manually-controlled directories. No matter in how different ways, their principle is to gather listings of URL and to make it available to be searched.

Manually-Controlled Directories

A manually-controlled directory, such as the Open Directory (DMOZ), depends on human effort for its listings. Webmaster who wants to have their websites listed on this kind of directories submits a short description. Editors approve their description or write a new one after their reviews. The listings on the directories will not change as the content on the website changes.

Crawler-Based Robots

It costs too much human labors and time to gather the listings. So human made the robot to work for them. Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, crawl everywhere on the internet, creating their listings automatically, which make the search actions much easier and more popular. Crawler-based search engines visit the websites frequently, and keep their listings up to date.

"Hybrid Search Engines" Or Mixed Results
MSN Search is more likely to present human-controlled listings from LookSmart. However, it also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.
Apparently, no matter which kind of search engines you would like to use, they are popular today because they are useful, although not too much people are aware of it.

Just because of these search engines, the new generation of marketing: Search Engine Marketing is growing in a tremendous speed. As the number of sites on the web increased in these few decades, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs. More and more related services become available. Come back to this blog to read more about search engine marketing if you are interested in it in the future.