Top Search Engines in General

Before familiarizing with Top search engines, let’s dwell on a question, what is search engine at all? A search engine is a complex program defining the most relevant information in the WWW and providing it to the customer on the request of definite keyword or phrase. However, it’s only a top of iceberg; the nature of top search engines is complex and constantly improving.

Everybody surfing the Web resorts to the help of search engines in information retrieval, and really, search engines are the only means by which find website without knowing its definite address. It’s natural that to get the most relevant information, people use only the top search engines. In fact, they offer much more that just looking up the webpages out there that contain words from your query. For example, Google can be used for a much wider range of purposes from finding all sites linking to a given one, looking up definitions of technical terms, Internet shopping, to evaluating mathematical expressions and more.

Types of Top Search Engines

The world of top search engines could be divided into Crawler-based, Human-powered, Hybrid, and Pay-per-performance search engines. Crawler-based (also known as “traditional” and “common”) utilize special software, surfing the Internet, to supplement their database. Search engine spider scans parameters which are not visible for a human. It doesn’t differ the amenities of design, but sees only the code of images, which throws obstacles between it and your content. The most important for search engine robot is the relevancy of your printed text. The frequency of your keywords and phrases in the contents of the page, especially at the beginning and the end of it, should be encouraged. Among the top search engines of traditional kind are Google, Teoma, AllTheWeb, Alta Vista, and Hotbot.

Directories (also known as human-powered or -edited search engines) do not look for websites to index them; they prefer you to suggest your site. The most of them have “Add URL” pages where you fill out the required information such as the website title, description, keywords, and email. Basically, you select the proper category for the website and then, in accordance of tern, it will be examined by human editors. The decision of this editor could be only to accept or not to accept the site. As human-powered search engines do not have own algorithms to rank websites, they make it according to alphabetic sequence or Google Page Rank. Directories are often used by top search engines as a source of new pages to scan for indexation. Among the largest top search engines of human-edited nature there are Yahoo!, DMOZ, and Looksmart.

Hybrid Search engines utilize both types of listing. For example, MSN presents human-edited listings from Looksmart and crawler-based listing of its own Web crawler. Nowadays, some top search engines also resort to opposite listings such as Google and Yahoo!. However, it takes a small part of the whole process, and they are still leading representatives of their classes. Also, there are so called meta-search engines, which combine the results from the number of other top search engines at the same time and present them for a user. Among representatives of such kind of search engines you can find MetaCrawler and Dogpile. For example, MetaCrawler compiles the results of seven search engines including AltaVista and Lycos.
In Pay-per-performance search engines, you pay for your site to be listed, re-spidered, and top-ranked according to keywords you choose. There is not a big amount of sites focused only on paid inclusions, but the most prominent is Overture. Also, you can find some additional paid services provided by other top search engines, but it’s not obligatory to use them.

What is the structure of Crawler-based Top Search Engines?

The structure of such top search engines is similar and consists of three main elements.

The first is a Spider or Crawler. It surfs the Web looking for changes there such as pages recently created and updates of already indexed pages. Spiders crawl their way through links both inside the site and between websites. If there is no site to link to you, the search engine spider will visit your site only if you take advantage of suggesting the site yourself; the majority top search engines allow this.

The second element of crawler-based search engines is Index. The information gathered by search engine spiders gets to it. The Index of crawler-based top search engines is a huge knowledge box that concentrates the copies of all the pages found by spiders that are treated as relevant and worth to be posted by a top search engine. Even if a crawler visited your page, it doesn’t mean it will be indexed promptly. It could take for several months if you do not resort to using a “paid submission.”
The third top search engine’s element is Software. It scans the Index and presents the consecutive list of the most relevant pages on your query.

Every top search engine has its own algorithm, and the tuning of all search sngine crawlers differs. If you decide to rank high at a top search sngine, do not forget that the value will be given not by a person, but by an impartial search engine robot, which will not value your sophisticated design.

Most enjoyed Top Search Engines

Top search engines do their best to provide the most relevant information, and it’s really interesting to find out which of them are most popular. One of investigations of 2006 year gives such result of usage top search Engines in USA:

1. Google—42.7%.
2. Yahoo!—28%.
3. MSN—13.2%.
4. AOL—7.6%.
5. Ask—5.9%.

Other search engines together possess 2.6% of all searching requests.
This rate of top search engines doesn’t correlate to activities of other countries’ or the world’s searches at all, but it could have something in common with them.

In brief about some of Top Search Engines

Google is the leading top search engine of today with little more then 8,000,000,000 pages in its index. It consists of “regional” branches such as “Google Canada” and “Google Australia,”which are modifications of the main knowledge-base stored on the appropriate area servers. If you submit website to the “Main Google,” and it gets to the Index, it will be listed at every “branch.” Google inacts near 350 million searches per day, and it’s really the most authoritative one between top search engines.

Launched in 1994 ,Y ahoo! was the first and is still one of the most popular search engines as well as the leading Directory. It could take a lot of time (at the rate of few months) for editors to reach your request. Paid listings are also provided and should bring the consideration of editors of this top search engine in few days.

MSN, owned by Microsoft, is one of three top search engines. It was “powered” by Inktomi database, now owned by Yahoo!. However, since the February of 2005, it has used its own database. MSNBot can find any site on the Web. If your site does not appear in MSN Search, you can suggest your URL yourself to this top search engine.

Relations Between Top Search Engines

In this impetuous rush for the leading place between top search engines, a lot of methods to enrich the aim were used. Some top search engines are fed by another or absorb them. For example, Yahoo! owns AllTheWeb, Overture, and AltaVista and also owns and uses Inktomi’s technology and database for its partnering engines. Ask Jeeves owns and uses results and crawler of the Teoma engine. DMOZ is owned by Netscape, and Lycos owns HotBot and Tripod. Such correlations allow some of top search engines to struggle for leading places and others to fight stay afloat.
Every top search engine, no matter what kind it is, is provided to bring people the best information they need, and you should possess the sufficient and of current importance knowledge to climb to the most highly-ranked places of top search engines.