search engines : Java Glossary

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sherlock Holmes’ hat search engines
Search engines help you find material on the web. They are free. They make their money by showing you ads while you search. This entry will list the major search engines, tell you how to submit to them and discuss future search engine technology.
Introduction Obscure and National Search Engines Rant
General Search Set Up Your Own Search Engine Meta Words
Legend Submit Your Website to Mulitiple Engines Improving Your Ranking
Search Engine Sites Robots Links

Introduction

Search engines help you find material on the web. They are free. They make their money by showing you ads while you search. Submitting your site to search engines for indexing is a major way to increase traffic to your site.

My personal favourite is Google. It weeds out the trash and goes straight for the gold. If you are looking for a particular class of product, give the name of several examples rather than trying to describe the category. About 40% of people use Yahoo, which is not a true search engine. It in more a catalog of webpages, manually created. Microsoft’s Bing is in third place.

Legend

Submit Colour Code
submit code meaning
(add) Free to list
Pay to list
Does not accept submissions

Search Engine Sites

Name URL (Uniform Resource Locator) Submit Notes
GoodSearch logo goodsearch.com Donates to your selected charity when you use it. You can add your favourite charity to its list. Powered by Yahoo. Has an optional toolbar. It tracks your previous choice of favourite charity with a cookie.
google logo www.google.com (USA)
www.google.ca (Canada)
www.google.fr (France)
www.google.de (Germany)
www.google.ie(Ireland)
www.google.co.in (India)
www.google.co.il (Israel)
www.google.it (Italy)
www.google.co.jp (Japan)
www.google.co.nz (NZ)
www.google.ru (Russia)
www.google.es (Spain)
www.google.se (Sweden)
www.google.co.uk (UK)
others
(add USA) Details on Google search
Yahoo
yahoo logo
www.yahoo.com Has an organised library-like directory structure, not just keyword search. Sometimes free, but sometimes you must pay $199.00 USD (or $600.00 USD if there is any adult content to be listed). I think they are cutting their throats with these extremely high fees. It takes them 8 to 12 weeks to index your site. See the suggest a site button on each page of the category tree to submit.
Bing Bing.com does not accept submissions Microsoft’s search engine. Lets you search the web, images, videos, newsgroups and maps. How Bing differs from Google
about logo www.about.com (add) human guides, categories and subcategorise links.
All The Web www.alltheweb.com (add) Good for finding very obscure entries. aka FAST. They now get their data from Yahoo.
altavista logo www.altavista.com (add) Very large database — indexes everything on the web pages, not just the keywords. Popular with job recruiters. Tends to overwhelm. No longer has a free personal version called Discovery for searching your own hard disks. Buried on the main menu, on the left bottom, in tiny type, is submit a URL to submit your web pages for indexing. It takes one to two weeks for them to index your site.
altavista logo www.altavistacanada.com (add) Like Altavista, but with more emphasis on Canadian content. Buried on the main menu, on the left, in tiny type, is add a URL to submit your web pages for indexing.
aol logo search.aol.com (add) I could not figure out how to add an URL.
ask logo www.ask.com (add) Née AskJeeves. I quite like this site because it collects data from several other search engines and filters out most of the junk. The owners have also done quite a bit of work organising answers to common queries pointing you right away to a good site. I found it most useful for example for researching holidays. To submit a URL you write to url@ask.com and a human decides if, where and how to include it in Jeeve’s database of questions.
CodeEchange CodeExchange.ics.uci.edu Specialised for finding Java code.
Copernic
copernic logo
copernic.com It uses mama.com which queries other search engines. The image search is particularly good. Ties into the Copernic desktop search to index and search your desktop machine.
DMOZ
dmoz logo
dmoz.org (add) Has a Yahoo-like manual category system.
Dogpile
dogpile logo
www.dogpile.com Works by asking other search engines in parallel to look. Does not accept submissions.
excite logo www.excite.com (add) Slightly cleverer at putting most important hits first better than Altavista. Excite the company is buying up other search Engine companies such as Magellan. Excite also sells search engines to sites that want an index just of their site. The add your site link is very easy to overlook. It is just below the thin horizontal blue line. It takes two to six weeks for them to index your site.
FindThatFile.com FindThatFile For finding downloadable files, not HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) text.
Go Network
go.com logo
www.go.com (add)  
HotBot
HotBot Logo
www.hotbot.com (add) Now associated with either Ask Jeeve or Google. Formerly associated with Lycos.
Infoseek www.infoseek.com (add) Defunct now Go.com.
InfoSpace
InfoSpace logo
www.infospace.com (add)  
iWon
Iwon Logo
www.iWon.com (add) a sort of Publisher’s Clearing house prize site.
LookSmart www.looksmart.com (add)  
Lycos
lycos logo
www.lycos.com (add) Grandfather of all search engines. It takes two to six weeks for them to index your site. Lycos (and brothers) form the second largest database, second only to Google. However, it refreshes it’s 2.1 billion pages every nine to eleven days. It now collapses multiple hits to the same website to one hit per website.
Lycos Germany
lycos logo
www.lycos.de (add) Only for Germany
Lycos Italia
lycos logo
www.lycos.it (add) Only for Italy
InFind defunct.
MapPlanet www.mapplanet.com (add) Find things by latitude and longitude on a map. You can claim a cell for your web page.
MSN (Microsoft Network) search.msn.com (add)
Northern Light
northernlight logo
www.northernlight.com Now a subscription based business news engine.
PlanetOcean www.searchenginenews.com Search Engine News, paid journal
Search.com www.search.com (add) Searches through 200 search engines, auctions and newsgroups. Née SavvySearch. The ultimate domain name for a search engine.
SearchHound
searchhound logo
www.searchhound.com Must pay to list. Search rankings given to the highest bidder.
sympatico logo www.sympatico.msn.ca Has optional Canada-only filter. Lycos/MSN affiliate. Requires cookies turned on. Does not appear to accept submissions.
Zaba Search
TheYellowPages logo
zabasearch.com (add) Formerly the YellowPages
Torrentz www.torrentz.com (add) a search engine for BitTorrents
WebCrawler www.webcrawler.com (add) originally owned by AOL (America Online), now part of Excite. It takes two to six weeks for them to index your site.

Obscure and National Search Engines

Name URL Submit Notes
123 India www.123india.com (add) India Related Only
7Search 7search.com (add)  
Aache aache.com (add) Spanish
AEIWI www.aeiwi.com  
Big Finder www.bigfinder.de (add)  
Columbus Finder www.columbus-finder.de (add) in German
Latin World www.latinworld.com (add) Latin America
Net Search www.netsearch.org (add)  
Ottawa Kiosk www.ottawakiosk.com (add) Ottawa Canada only
Scrub The Web www.scrubtheweb.com (add) search engine toolbar
The Net 1 www.thenet1.com (add)  
The Web 100 www.web100.com (add)  
Voila www.voila.fr (add) French
Witch www.witch.de (add) In German and English
Wombat www.webwombat.com.au (add) Only for Australia
Yellow www.yellow.com.mx (add) Mexico

Set Up Your Own Search Engine

Software to set up your own search engine:

Services To Submit Your Website to Multiple Search Engines

You can submit your website to be included in multiple search engines via services such as: They will submit your home page to a number of search engines for incorporation. They may charge $40.00 USD or more for the service. See my student project to write a URL submitter.

googod.net offers a service to optimise your site to raise its ranking in the search engines.

Robots

you can discourage search engines from indexing certain pages by using metatags like this:

<META name=robots content=noindex, nofollow>

You can also have a central robots.txt file like this:

user-agent: * # directed to all robots
Disallow: zips # whatever directory/file you don’t want indexed.

Rant

I would like to get the authors of the search engine software and the authors of the browsers such as: together for a month on some nice Caribbean island. They must learn to make their products work together more smoothly. Imagine the possibilities!

Meta Words

Meta words is something I hope search engines will start implementing. Unlike the features mentioned in my rant above, meta words do not require the co-operation of browser manufacturers.

Consider these sorts of question:

You can spend hours wading through more than you wanted to know about the battle of Hastings without ever finding out when it was fought. Similarly you will find all kinds detailed technical specs on ADSL, without ever getting a clue what it is or what it stands for. I propose adding meta words to queries that help direct the search engine, e. g. You won’t necessary find these metawords on the target pages. You infer them, e. g. HTML <DT> tags imply definition; retail sites imply buy numbers and A.D. imply dates. Right now search engines discard most potential meta words simply because they are too common as ordinary search targets.

Users could start using metawords without any change to their current habits. They are likely already including them unaware they are being ignored.


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