Searching the web

To be a successful searcher you will need to know how to search and what search service to use. This section is here to provide you with practical information on how to find the relevant information you require.

Over the years search engines have got a lot better. The top search providers are now able to return far better results that they used to. 

About searching.

Web search is very widely used and for literally loads of reasons. Surfing the web will usually start of with a search for a specific topic. A lot of people will use the built in search feature that is incorporated into their browser, you will also find that a lot of people will have a portal as their homepage, portals almost always have a search feature.

Over the past few years people who run websites have tried to trick search engines into sending them traffic that they aren't entitled to. For example a site about gardening may insert cars into their meta tags in order to target a more competitive keyword and, as a result receive more traffic. Today search engines are a lot better at handling this sort of thing and tend to concentrate on the pages real content when they index the pages. This has lead to a great increase in search engine relevance.

There are generally two kinds of search site. Search engines and web directories. A search engine is a very large database that is searchable using keywords. Google is an excellent example of a large scale search engine. Search engines use robots or spiders to crawl the web. 

The spider acts like a web surfer in that it finds web pages and follows link to other web pages. The spider will then index each page it finds. The indexed data is then fed into a massive database and is searchable by a user to the search engine. 

Web directories work in a different way. They are large collections of websites that are grouped into categories. Yahoo and the Open Directory Project are great examples of large scale web directories. The aim of using a directory is to narrow down your search by browsing though categories. You start at a very general category at the top and work your way down through more specific categories until you find websites that match your search.

Search engines are a lot faster than directories because the entire process is automated, you simply type in a search string and click on search. Searching using a directory take a while longer, but some say it gives you a lot more control over your eventual results.

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