The main search engines
To-day's suggestions: Google - Raging - Infoseek - Hotbot (keeping Northernlight and Fast
up your sleeve)
I have chosen four of the many 'main' search engines in order to give you a small
'taste' of the
differences.
When you'll search 'for true' you better consider as well Northernlight (which uses result
clustering to prevent
domination of results from a small set of sites) and Fast/alltheweb (the
'stopword searcher',
try
the query "to be or not to be" on Fast and
confront your results with the same search on Raging or on Hotbot :-).
Search engines are costantly being ameliorated and use pools of rotating algos
for relevance ranking of the results in order to keep spammers and commercial
bastards at by. If you want to see an example of a good search engine (actually a search
directory)
that is gone
worse with
time visit yahoo (now "powered" by google but using different algos).
Google
Google has moved to Linux this year
Google is extremely quick, quite accurate (if you use it for specific searches)
and very useful for stalkers and combers
because it has CACHED pages! (remember that in google it does not hurt to put a
+ before every queryword :-)
There are two 'philosphical schools' about google: many searchers
find that since the last big
algorithm changes this sommer Google results have got much worse
("google finds very fast very useless results"). Some
searchers assure that they cannot
find anything relevant with google, and that
the hype surrounding this search engine
is only due to the abilities
of google's PR department. There's a grain of truth:
the more specific your search, the best results you will
obtain on google, whereas generic searches wont give results as
accurate as those that you can
get with
alta's raging or Infoseek's plethora of different "NEAR" operators.
It's still one of my top
most useful 'generic' search engines, though.
Moreover Google has cached pages (for stalkers
combers and klebers a most important feature). Google's politic against spammers and
commercial zombies trying to push 'their' sites on the first positions through cloaking
is also very harsh, an added advantage if you ask me. Google has an algo that weights inbound
links to elevate the pages'
rankings.
RAGING
Hotbot, an 'Inktomi type' search engine (acquired by Lycos, like Tripod and Angelfire), uses
DMOZ and Direch
Hit results. Now some exact searches are starting to come up with word groupings in text deep
in the pages, à la google way.
Its database has been quite inconsistent, recently, with samo samo searches giving results
as different as up to 50%. Moreover Hotbot is one of the
main culprits among search engines suspected - quite rightly- to sell rankings for money.
Main search engines, a first conclusion
Most of the people inside 'search engines algos cracking' are either spammers or
commercial operators intent to 'push' their client sites in the first ranking positions.
Since most normal zombie users would never dream to go behyond the first 10-20 results ranked
(if ever),
high rankings on the first result page(s) are - as you may expect - of paramount relevance
(and commercial value).
Indeed there's a lot
of money currently raining into this specific field... run
around this field with your hat upside down and
you'll surely get a part of it.
Yet be warned: I have noticed that searchers and algo-reversers overly interested in
money don't understand much of what's really going on under the hoods...
they always have a
too 'contingent' attitude... if
you understand what I mean. A nice "legge del contrappasso" if you ask me.
This said for traffic purposes
search engines are indeed great, yet 'fame' and 'web-press'
articles are even more important.
If you can become a somewhat recognized name
in a given industry and are able to provide new and relevant content
to said industry, you're golden.
Anyway even knowing how the main search engines operate and reversing their algos
is not enough for a good searcher: in order to
search effectively you must also know that there are important seeking resources
elsewhere.
