What are the primary types of search engines and directories?
To understand the importance of improving your site’s rank, it is necessary to understand the basic idea of how search engines index and retrieve documents. There are basically two types of search services: 1. Search engines. These use spiders to index Web sites. You submit your page to a search engine and the spider will index your entire site. Theoretically these spiders might find your site by accident but odds are they will not unless you go to them and tell them about your site by filing out their ‘submit” page. Examples are HotBot, Alltheweb (FAST) and Google. 2. Directories. These rely on submissions from users and Web site owners to populate their indexes. Most directories add your site to their index but generally they link only to your home page rather than indexing the full text of each page on your site. Examples are Yahoo1!, AOL and Open Directory. How do search engines operate? A software spider is a program operated by a search engine that surfs the web just like you do.
