Searchlinks Home Page
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For detailed lists of search engines, click on the A-Z or the World Region entries on the left sidebar. For quick connection to the really big portals and directories, just click on one of the entries below.
AltaVista.com | Go.com |
AOL.com/netfind (directory) | Goto.com |
Lycos.com | Hotbot.com |
Directhit.com | Northernlight.com |
Euroseek.com | Webcrawler.com |
Looksmart.com(directory) | Webtop.com |
MSNsearch.com | Yahoo.com (directory) |
Notes on Search Engines
There are basically two types of search engine. The first type is the automated search engine which uses automated searchers called spiders, crawlers, robots, or bots. Spiders crawl the web every two or three weeks looking for new web pages. When they find a new one, they put it into their search engines index. Note that there are only two ways that a spider will ever find your web page. Either, it finds a link to your page on a page that it already knows about, follows that link, and indexes your page. Or, you submit your URL(address) to the search engine, telling it where to go before it starts its crawl. If neither of these happen, the spider will never find your page.
The second type is the directory. Instead of using bots or spiders, the directory uses humanbeings to enter web sites into the index. Yahoo.com is an example of an index. If you want your web site to be listed in Yahoo, you have to submit it and have it reviewed by an editor. The advantage of a directory is that, by definition, every page is reviewed by a human, so the quality of search results for the user tends to be higher. The disadvantage is that it can't compete with the spiders for sheer volume