Chapter 6. Search engines - how and what they do

Chapter 6. Search Engines - how and what they do

This is part 6 of the 10 part eBook "Online Business Bible." You can get the entire eBook by joining our newsletter at http://www.gbizbuilders.com.

I, like many of you, am searching for opportunities on the Internet. I have had multiple successful service businesses as well as senior positions in Fortune 100 corporations. To attain my goals of great income, flexible work hours, and personal freedom in living my life, I want to take advantage of the biggest and fastest growing business opportunity of all time - opportunities on the Internet. I am going to start with broad information and will narrow in and also offer tips that I have uncovered after hundreds and hundreds of hours of doing business and research on the internet. In this section, we take a look at search engines.

Many times a day, we use our cars without understanding how the engine works or without ever taking a look under the hood. Let's take a look under the hood of the most-used feature of the Internet, the search engine. Search engines have become one of the major rule-makers, traffic givers and money makers of the Internet. People perform searches millions and millions of times a day across thousands of search engines. There are about 25 different well-known search engines (and bunches more not so well-known). Some of the better-known: Google, MSN, Yahoo, Lycos, Ask, Dogpile, Metacrawler, AOL Search, Excite, Alexa, About, Alta Vista, and so forth.

Here is a link to Wikipedia which shows the history of search engines since 1993. 2 new well-known search engines were added in 2007!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine

The specific term "search engines" itself is searched thousands of times a day. People are asking

How are they important to me?
How do they work?
What is important to know about search engines?
Which one will I choose and What is the best way to use it?
How can I make money using search engines?

How do search engines work?

We know that search engines help us get information (and lots of it!). These search engines bring us this information by having search "spiders" or "web crawler" (also known as web spider or web robot). Web crawlers are mainly used to create a copy of all the visited pages for later processing by a search engine that will index the downloaded pages to provide fast searches. Below is a link which discusses spiders and web crawlers in more detail:

Web crawler - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Particular website places that these spider programs look at are the website's Title Tag, Description Meta Tag, Keyword Meta tag, and the website's content. These elements of a website, some of which you don't see when viewing the website, contain words that describe the website and which are used by the search spider to describe the website in the search results that are returned. Let's look at an example which shows how website information is display on a search engine's results page:

Notice how the search terms are bolded in the search results. The words used in the search appear but in any order on the returned results. TIP: If you want search results to be returned for the exact phrase you type, put the phrase in quotes, ex: "search engine spider" will return only those results where these words are one after another just as in the phrase that was typed.

Back to what I said about the things you don't see. The Description and Keyword Metatags are part of the website programming but are not normally visible when viewing the website. They are purely for the search engine's use and to provide some additional information about your pages. TIP: If you want to see these descriptive elements of a website, go to the "View" choice, then choose "Source" or "View Source" and you will see the background coding of a website with these metatag elements. (Would this be a good way to learn what a site's main keywords or descriptive tags are? Yes!)

Now, what is important to know about search engines?

Aside from being sources of information, search engines are great places to advertise. The top 3 search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN, all have advertising programs. These sponsored search results appear at the top and the side of the returned search results. Let me show you an example below. The first box shows the ads along the top and to the side (ususally with an off-white background in Google). The second box shows the natural (sometimes called "organic") search results that are not part of the sponsored results:

Which Search Engines to Use?

Search engines each have their own search algorithms (the way they dig for, index and classify information). Which search engines to use? Here is a small discussion about which search engines might be best for the searches listed:

To search as much as the Web as possible? Google or AlltheWeb.com

To browse a subject area? Yahoo, Lookmart or the Open Directory

To search Newsgroups? Yahoo, Google Newsgroups, AltaVista, HotBot

To search every word on a site or in a document? AltaVista, or HotBot

To retrieve a large number of results? AltaVista or a metasearch engines such as Savvy Search or Metacrawler

To search reviewed and evaluated sites? Looksmart's select directory)

How can you use search engines to make money?

They can help you make money in 2 ways.

1. Advertising to get traffic: The top 3 search engines (Google, MSN, Yahoo), and many others, have programs for bidding on "keywords" to place your advertisement on the search results page with a link to your website (or someone else's website). This means that when a person has entered a search that includes a keyword you have bid on, then your ad copy will appear on a page of the search results. The more you pay for the keyword, and the number of clicks (CTR or click through rate) your ad gets, the better its chance for getting on the first page of the search results. Google's advertising program is called AdWords. You can get more info and also sign up using this link: Googles AdWords program

2. Natural search results placement: If you have a website which is very important - according to the search engine's algorithms - then you may achieve placement on the first page of the search results. This is done by website "Search Engine Optimization" or SEO. This has to do with having a website that has important title and metatag keywords, relevant content, highly-searched keywords, links to your website from others websites, and other factors. SEO is a topic all by itself and will be discussed in later writings.

That's the brief discussion about search engines. Later topics will take a deeper look at