Spider Engines

Before you complete the registration of your website with search engines, be sure that you know how they work. The generic term "search engine" includes all websites that are designed to make it easier for Internet users to find the information they are looking for.

Search engines can be classified into spider search engines (also referred to as "real search engines") and directories. Although they might look the same to the user, they follow a different concept in assembling the result pages. A third group of services, so-called free-for-all list have nothing to do with search engines.

These search engines (often also referred to as spiders or crawlers) constantly visit websites on the Internet to generate catalogs of websites. Spider engines such as Fireball generate the result pages automatically. The entire web is searched for pages that match the criteria. It is up to the user to subsequently separate the useful from the superfluous. Spider search engines can therefore automatically detect modifications that you have made in your website. Such modifications in turn affect the way your page is included in a result page, whereby a wide range of issues is important: page title, text blocks, etc. Spider search engines are based on powerful machines that are able to index millions of pages. They therefore normally find more matches than directories. Spider search engines normally accept all submitted websites.

Hybrid search engines

To make things more complicated, many search engines today combine a spider engine with a directory service. The directory normally contains pages that have already been reviewed and assessed. When carrying out a query in a hybrid search engine, the reviewed pages are generally not included in the result page but must be specifically selected by the user. Whether a website is included in the directory of a spider search engine is a matter of luck and the quality of the content and design. Sometimes, you have the option to "request" a review, but whether this is actually carried out cannot be influenced.

Other search engines

Apart from the above search engines, there are a number of other facilities on the Internet that are designed to make it easier for users to find information. There are for example numerous award services that assess and award websites. The idea is the promotion of good web design. In return for an award, you are however requested to place a banner of the award-giving organization on your website. We could fill volumes with the shenanigans of such schemes. A highly amusing story is told on the homepage of Ralf Sturm (alias "Schlingel"), whose webpage "Webhexe" has won 38 (!) awards! The only odd thing here is: the website that has won all these awards does not exist! The whole idea of award pages is to place their banner on as many pages as possible. And giving away fictitious awards is a simple way of achieving this!

Another topic related to the number of visits are hit counters. A visitor of such a hit counter site is for example shown a list of the 100 most visited websites. The number of visitors is shown right beside the link to the respective site. Also here, the system involves a link (or a banner) on your website to the hit counter page. This link ensures that each visitor is actually counted.

In theory, the idea sounds rather clever. In practice, these pages are extremely exposed to manipulation. There are currently utilities available with which users can "push" their website. These programs lead the hit counter to believe that a site has been accessed for hundreds of different IP addresses, and the counter goes up rapidly. Such manipulations obviously aim at making a website the number one visited site. (If you are interested to know more about "IP manipulation", this rather strange page tells you all about it: http://www.hackersclub.com/km/library/).

Due to the severe manipulations that take place on hit counter sites, they should not be your priority when promoting your website. If you do not wish to be connected in any way with potentially shabby operators, do not accept any third-party banner on your pages. If somebody wishes to "award" your website, enjoy it! However, if you are requested to position a banner on your website, you should be very careful in accepting the "honor".