Exercise 23: Search mechanisms

1. What is a spider? What does it do?
Spider is a program that used by search engines to fatch and analysis documents in the Internet. This action is also called 'crawling'. The home page of the Web sites will be found and indexed by search engines, to get more information it is necessary to conduct a further search on the site in deep. Different from traditional information retrieval, both content and structure of the Web site are critical for Web searching. It is because both of them are important in the Web sites ranking (Paula 2005).

2. What is a meta-search engine? Provide some examples.
Accept search key from users and then transmits the search request to several individual search engines and their databases of web pages. Meta-search engines do not own their search database of Web pages, (UC Berkeley, 2008).

Examples of Meta-searchers:
Clusty: clusty.com
Dogpille: www.dogpile.com
SurWax: www.surfwax.com
Copernic Agent: www.copernic.com

3. How can you get your site listed at major search sites; and how could you improve your site ranking?

Get your site listed at major search sites and improve your site ranking (Yahoo, N.A.):

• Subscript your Web site to major search sites for them easy to reach your Web site.
  
• Declare the key terms that your users will search on to find content like yours carefully. Use those key terms to guide the text and construct your web pages.
• As users are likely to click the link if the title matches their search, then choose terms for the title that match the concept of your document.
• Use meta-tag as a description and wirte the decription accurately and carefully. Make sure the document title and description attract the interest of the user.
• Use 'keyword' in meta-tag to list key words for the document.
  
• Keep relevant text and links in HTML. An HTML site map, with a link from the welcome page, can help to make sure all your pages are crawled by the search engines.
• Use ALT text for graphics for good page design to accommodate text browers or visually impaired visitors.
  

Reference

1. Paula, Y. (2005). The effective use of search engines on the internet: Nursing Standard, 19, 56-64.
2. UC Berkeley (2008), Meta-search engines, UC Berkeley - Teaching Library Internet Workshops, Retrieved at http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html on 3rd May, 2009.
3. Yahoo (N.A.), How do i improve the ranking of my web site in the search results, Yahoo, Retrieved at http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/ranking/ranking-02.html on 3rd May, 2009.