Search Engine Review

 

Welcome to the Search engine reviews section were we at UK Webmaster World take a closer look into the major search engines you as a webmaster will come across & no doubt will begin to optimize your website for. Our Search engine review section will look at the major search engines Google, Yahoo! & Live Search (MSN).

Google.com

Google is by far the most well thought off & used crawler based search engine used in the world. Its reach is well, lets say mostly every were. Google is the primiary Search engine webmasters, website owners & business owners want to do well in, in terms of optimizing there keywords (search terms) to be number 1 on the result pages.

Google first moved from it's Alpha testing version to Beta in February 1999 to officially launch on September 21st, 1999.

Now in 2008 Google has by far expanded its early day search engine services, now Google holds databases for web (Indexed Web pages), Images (Picture database), Groups (Usenet news database), News (Web-based news sites), Book Search (Full Web-based text books), Google Scholar (Academic papers, articles, reports, and citations), Directory (A version of the DMOZ: Open Directory), Froogle (Shopping and product search) & Catalog Search (Scanned product catalogs).

The Google database is used by AOL and several other sites. Yahoo! dropped Google in Feb. 2004 in favor of its own database.

Strengths of Google

• Google database size & scope, It is one of the largest, and includes PDF, DOC, PS, and many other file types.
• Google Search results are returned on relevance based sites using linkages and authority.
• Google Cache gives the ability to view a website archive of web pages as they looked when they were indexed.
• Google & its other databases provide an all-in-one information database including Google Groups, News, Directory, Books, Scholar, etc.

Weaknesses of Google

• Site Limitation Inaccuracy
  A search such as  site:www.google.com google should only find pages at Google. Yet with the number of hits set to 100, some records come up from adobe.com, digits.com, osdn.com, and even washington.edu. The search of   site:google.com google seems more accurate at least in the top 100 hits, but it pulls in results from directory.google.com, groups.google.com, etc.
• Google has no case sensitive searching
  Using either lower or upper case results in the same hits. (This can be a weakness for some users searches).
• Inaccurate Index Count
  The total number of search results presented is almost always stated as "about" some number that when large is typically a multiple of 1,000 or 10,000.

Google Field Searching

Google offers an advanced way of Searching the internet away from the standard "enter search term & click search". Google offers several field searches connected with entering urls/domain of a website, details on these advanced search commands & what the actual commands tell Google Search engine to do are outlined below:

• intitle:
  Finds pages that have the term(s) in the HTML title element. Can be combined with other search terms. intitle:webmaster forums. This should find 'webmaster' in the title and 'forums' anywhere in the page.
• inurl:
  Finds pages that have the term(s) somewhere in the url (host name, path, or filename). Can be combined with other search terms. inurl:ukwebmasterworld.
• allintitle:
  Finds pages that have the term(s) in the HTML title element. allintitle:webmaster forums.
• link:
  Finds pages which contain hypertext links to the exact specified url. link:ukwebmasterworld.com/ finds pages with links to this site. Unfortunately, on Google, link: searches are incomplete & do not retrieve all pages that Google has indexes that link to the specified url.
• allinurl:
  Finds pages that have the term(s) somewhere in the url (host name, path, or filename). allinurl:ukwebmasterworld.
• site:
  Finds pages from the designated Web site. Path and file names can be included. site:ukwebmasterworld.com/about.html
• allinanchor:
  Finds pages that have the term(s) somewhere in the links to the page.
• related:
  Invokes GoogleScout to find other pages similar in linkage patterns to the given url and at a similar hierarchical level. The url must be exact. In other works related:ukwebmasterworld.com & related:ukwebmasterworld.com/about.html find different results.

Site Promotion & SEO Serives

Nominate your site for February contest

Content Management System (CMS) Joomla Joomla eCommerce (Virtumart)