| If you are a well-informed, respectable, and observant citizen of the Internet, you will most likely be well acquainted with the different search engines that are in use today. The three major search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN, are the benchmarks of success for many Internet marketing experts. This is because Google, Yahoo, and MSN are also the search engines that are most commonly used by Internet users, and if they are not directly used as search engines, their indexes are most commonly used for consolidated search engines such as Ask and DogPile. Is there any difference among the three major search engines, aside from their URLs? It can be difficult to compile accurate data on the users of such search engines, but it can be seen that millions of people use these search engines every day in order to do research, download software, find entertainment, or simply surf or hop from blog to blog. Google, Yahoo, and MSN, moreover, have differences in terms of the websites that their spiders and robots pick up, and this can be a good way to first, tailor website preferences and content to match these search engines? requirements, and second, it can give Internet marketers a fairly good idea how versatile their web content is. In general, Google has the most active web spiders, robots, and crawlers: it sends out feelers almost every two weeks, on average. These spiders, robots, and crawlers serve one purpose: they are designed to pick up the density of keywords and key phrases in websites in order to determine how to properly index these websites. Google spiders are also more sophisticated than most web crawlers, according to the makers: these spiders can pick up signals if a website is overusing keywords and key phrases. This filtering mechanism however, has not been as fail safe as of late, and not all the websites that appear on Google are true results. Google, however, still has tools to filter out meta keywords, which are scripts that appear in the website header but do not emerge in the body of the website. Such filters are also functional in MSN and Yahoo, although both sites have higher filtering mechanisms that sometimes produce fewer results than if one were to carry out the same search in Google. Yahoo, however, is sensitive to different keywords, and can actually pick up IP addresses. Google ignores these numbers often, but Yahoo can crawl through forums and pick up these IP addresses. There are also different numbers and keywords that Yahoo can go through, which is why researchers are often advised to use Yahoo and Google in tandem when doing research. This is because Google will produce millions of results in some cases, but the last fifty or so percent of this search group will probably include sites that are not useful or that do not contain the right content at all. MSN produces even fewer searches, and it does not have the sensitivity associated with Google and Yahoo. This might mean that it produces higher quality search results, but often, search results from MSN look like chunks taken out of Google or Yahoo, minus some results. The search interface for images of MSN, however, is quite user friendly, so if you have graphics on your site, they might figure well in an MSN image search. These are only a few facts associated with these search engines. If you need more information, do more research on the search engines themselves, and be on the lookout for updates on search engine crawling activity. |