Custom Search Engines, Commercial Search Engines & Meta-Search Engines

When you say 'Search Engine', you automatically think of 'Google', MSN Search', 'Yahoo Search', etc. But do you realize that these are not the most common ones? The fact is that there are millions of private custom search engines out there.

The main overriding purpose of a search engine is relevancy. If someone searches for information, and the information returned is not relevant, then the person stops using that search engine. Relevancy is very important to Google, MSN & Yahoo as if their search results are not relevant, then many people might stop using their service. They then couldn't charge advertisers the same amount and they would lose business to other commercial search engines.

Custom Search Engines

Custom Search Engines created to search your own web site. If you have a large website and want people to find information fast without having to go through the navigation system, then a custom search may be for you. Make sure that when you choose someone to set up your own custom search engine, that the people doing it understand their nuances and that only relevant result get delivered. Though you can use commercial search engines to index your own web site, you then have to put up with all of the advertisements and other 'features' that they may offer (including links to your competition)!

>Commercial Search Engines

Commercial Search Engines are the large search engines that maintain their own databases, do their own indexing and run their own spiders (or search-bots). Examples are;

• Google Search
• MSN Search
• Yahoo Search
• Teoma

Commercial Search Engines operate by using;

• Crawlers, Spiders or Search-Bots to have a look at every page on their list of pages to review. The Spiders work by starting on one page and then looking at all key words (words over 3 letters in length, so they don't bother with 'connector' words like 'in, and, on, is, it, etc.). They check if the key word is emphasized in some way (bold, italicized, or linked), and they count the number of occurrences of the key word on the page along with its relative position to other key words. For each link it finds, the spider tries to go to the linked page and then index (search) that page and on and on. All of this information is then entered into a big database called an index or catalog.
• A Search Engine Index or Catalog is where all of the relationships and relevancy reside. It is this information that gets queried. If one webpage links to a page on another website, then that acts as a 'vote' for the linked-to web page. All of these 'votes' along with the stored key words for a web page, result in a pages Page-Rank which can be viewed as an award for that pages relevancy in the search results compared to other web pages. A '0' means least relevant, a '10' means most relevant. To look at a pages Page-Rank, you can download Google free Toolbar for your browser.
• The Search Engine Interface is the part most familiar to the public. This is the webpage that allows you to enter your search words or search phrase, the index get queried, and then the interface returns the relevant search results. The results are returned in order of page rank, and also may include 'Sponsored' or 'Paid for Placement' web pages too. Sponsored web sites, are web sites that rank highly on search engine results because the web site owners have paid fees for higher positions in the search results to the search engine companies.

Search Engine Rankings can make or break a business. The higher up the position in the search results means more traffic and more customers. To gain higher positioning in search the engine results means your website needs to be optimized as part of a Search Engine Optimization campaign or designed with it in mind from the start.

Meta-Search Engines
Aren't pure search engines in their own right. Meta-Search Engines use commercial search engines to bring back their results. As each commercial search engine only covers a certain percentage of the internets web pages, having a means to combine search results from various search engines can give you a wider, more in depth view of what you are searching for. Examples of Meta-Search Engines are;

• Dogpile
• Clusty
• SurfWax
• Copernic

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