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 three search systems
Understanding how search engines work
Gathering tools and basic knowledge
You’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 find out about your 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 — Google, AOL, Yahoo!, and Bing (formerly MSN) — but you’ve probably also heard of others: HotBot, Dogpile, Ask.com, Netscape, and EarthLink. There’s also Lycos, InfoSpace, Mamma.com, WebCrawler, and many more. To top it all off, ...
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