Chapter 1
Surveying the Search
Engine Landscape
In This Chapter
Discovering where people search
Understanding the difference between search sites and search systems
Distilling thousands of search sites down to four search systems
Understanding how search engines work
Gathering tools and basic knowledge
Y
ou’ve got a problem. You want people to visit your Web site; that’s the
purpose, after all — to bring people to your site to buy your product, or
learn about service, or hear about the cause you support, or for whatever
other purpose you’ve built the site. So you’ve decided you need to get traffic
from the search engines — not an unreasonable conclusion, as you find out
in this chapter. But there are so many search engines! You have the obvious
ones — the Googles, AOLs, Yahoo!s, and MSNs of the world — but you’ve
probably also heard of others: HotBot, Dogpile, Ask Jeeves, Netscape,
EarthLink, LookSmart . . . even Amazon provides a Web search on almost
every page. There’s Lycos and InfoSpace, Teoma and WiseNut, Mamma.com
and WebCrawler. To top it all off, you’ve seen advertising asserting that, for
only $49.95 (or $19.95, or $99.95, or whatever sum seems to make sense to
the advertiser), you too can have your Web site listed in hundreds, nay, thou-
sands of search engines. You may have even used some of these services,
only to discover that the flood of traffic you were promised turns up missing.
Well, I’ve got some good news. You can forget almost all the names I just
listed — well, at least you can after you’ve read this chapter. The point of this
chapter is to take a complicated landscape of thousands of search sites and
whittle it down into the small group of search systems that really matter.
(Search sites. Search systems. Don’t worry, I explain the distinction in a
moment.)
