Children search engines- These are search engines specifically made for children. These search engines filter out filthy things on the internet such as swear words and sexual content and instead is dominated by children sites displaying facts and information's kids can ask simple questions such as "why how far is the moon from the earth ?and can also go on games and stuff. and all sorts. Examples include Ask for kids, akol and kids click and yahooligones,search engines are extremely useful for kids and all the search engines have different ways of filtering out the results.
For example Yahooligans is specifically inspected by humans to ensure the sites in 10directories do not have any naughty content and will hand pick the websites from its current directory. But sites like Ask for kids just use software to filter out the current results and only displays sites that are appropriate for children.
Sites like fact-monster also use this method.
Though some don't trust this software as sometimes something inappropriate might still pop up very occasionally. As these are not pre screened by humans.
How search engines work
Registering your website
Web crawlers- The best way to register a site on most web crawler based websites is to link your website on another page. This way when the crawler bot when inspecting the website will likely pick up the link to your website and add in into its data base of sites.
Another way people get their website on web crawler based search engines is to include their website on the search engines URL page which is where you type in your URL. people who do this often add other URL to other parts of their websites just in case their homepage isn’t working. This provides an easy way for you to directly get your website included in most search engines.Also google provides an option to submit a huge list of pages in which you can verify ownership/ Unfortunately it takes up to a month on average, till search engines actually include new sites in to their indexes specifically on google. Also there are no guarantees that your site is going to include you in their index. This is why the alternate method is used more often then search engine URL pages, just to get their website on crawler bot databases quicker.
Promoting your websites
The best way to promote a site is by giving your site a good description of your site, to attract people to your website. Some might put a introduction to their site through the first few paragraphs to show visibly to other users, this widely depends on the search engine your registered with. While others will use a meta tags. Meta tags are basically a way for the crawler bot to give a good description of what your site is about.
How search engines rank their results
Search engines follow a specific algorithm to rank millions(in googles case billions) of sites. This involves following specific rules to determine a sites relevancy. All search engines have their unique way of organizing the sites, but all follow two specific rules that are at the core of their method. The first is keywords. Search engines often look through sites headlines or titles. To check to see any keyword relating to the search is on the headline or tile of the website or if it is mentioned in the first paragraph of the site. This is an assumption that the site is relevant to the users search. An example would be that if i typed on a search bar " planet earth". The crawler bots would look through sites which contained the words planet and earth, it would then narrow down the sites that are using it as their title or in their first paragraph. The second rule followed by crawler based search engines is the frequency of the keywords used by the user. So if a certain keyword relating to the user search, appears on site quite frequently this would be ranked fairly high by the search engine. Using the same example about the search " planet earth " . If the planet earth keyword was to appear on a wikipedia page on the planet earth countless time. Or a site dedicated to explaining the diversity or structure of planet earth. It would most likely rank high up on the search results.
Unfortunately these methods above are easy to manipulate. By simply adding certain keywords to your site to improve site ranking. Fortunately Google came up with more efficient ways of ranking sites called link analysis. In short, google would mostly rank sites based on the amount of times websites linked to you. So basically this increased the reliability of the results and made it more difficult to manipulate. On the other hand, recently web masters have found ways of manipulating this system. By putting their own links on already high ranking websites to raise their ranking. Another method quite widely used is called click-through measurement. Essentially this means that search engines will monitor the amount of clicks high ranking sites receive from a particular search. If a certain site receives low clicks while a site below it receives much more. The above will be ranked lower along the search results, while the other site gets ranked higher for its popularity.
No search engine use the same method, as they have all developed then own unique algorithm. And only use the above method to some degree.
How to search
Keywords
are the most effective way of searching online. Since search engines use specific keywords to find sites that match the search. The most effective way of doing this is by using nouns or objects for example instead of searching " cat needs washing" you search " cat wash". Verbs are best avoided. Also most search engines require at-least 6-7 keywords.
Key words can differ quite dramatically depending on the the type of search engine your using, like of you compare a kids search engine to a adult/standard search engine, you will see a dramatic difference in what search result will come up.
In this picture below you can see that when you type in the key word “car” in Ask kids you get results which contain movies of animated cars and games involving cars. But now if you go on a standard search engine and search the term ”car”, you get different host of websites containing cars for sale, image of cars, and concept car and online magazines.
Boloens operators
When you go into a library and ask a Liberian "shoes". This will probably confuse his/her and she would respond by asking questions about shoes to narrow down exactly what kind of book you want. Well these are basically a search engines way of narrowing down your search to get exactly what you want. What is used is called Boolean operators. These help users narrow down their search to get exactly what they want. Popular Boolean operators include AND, NOT, OR , AND NOT, NEAR. These operator help dramatically improve the efficiently of your search and increase the chance of the search being what your looking for. Each operator has different function, firstly:
AND- And is used in search engines when your want to include every keyword you put into your search. For example if i put in " science books AND history books AND english books " The And in the search would indicate that i want sites that include the key words science books, history books and english books. The key advantage of this operator is the fact that it prevents certain keywords from being ignored. If i was to search those terms again, but without the AND. Its likely maybe history books would have been ignored since more sites might be more dedicated to selling science books and english.
NOT- This is a exact opposite of AND as it is used when you don't want something included. Lets again imagine that i search History books AND english books NOT science books. The difference is that i want my search to include history books and english books, but no sites containing the word science books. Like the AND operator you can filter out sites that have nothing to do with what your searching for or keeps popping up with other subjects that are related to your search.(some search may instead use - instead of NOT).
OR- OR is used for when you search serval keywords,and want your search results to contain at-least one of does keywords. For example searching " universities in England OR universities in the UK " indicates you don't really care if your don't get sites containing one keywords, just as long as you get the other. Meaning that if you got a website containing universities all over the U.K that will be great. But if you mostly got web pages containing universities in England that would still be fine for you.
NEAR- And lastly NEAR. This is used when you want keywords to be at-least in the same sentence or paragraph. So if i searched "global warming NEAR human activity. I would get search results containing both global warming and human activity as-well as having the two terms at close proximity to each other.
The benefit of this is that you don't get two terms in completely different parts of the website or three paragraphs apart. As this will illustrate that the site is most likely not linking the two terms.
This isn’t necessary for Directories, since directories already put their websites in different categories which helps the user narrow down what his looking for. In the picture on the right. You can see that that the search are organized into different sub-sections. In my earlier scenario, where i was searching for sites about basketball but not football. I used examples of how you can use different mathematical symbols or Boolean operators, to get exactly what you want. Fortunately with directories, such as yahoo directory. You can look through different categories to get websites only containing information about basketball.
On the other hand, you have yahoo search which will not organize it’s search in categories. Which is why it uses Boolean operators, so you filter out unwanted information.
Wildcard search
Wildcards search is when you search for phrases but are missing a letter or word. The gap is mainly filled with an anyxeria( * ) or simply a question mark ( ?). For example " a man needs a women to be * in order for him to be happy" . This is extremely helpful for when you know nearly all the words but just can't quite get that last word. Some might use it to find song lyrics so might put in a sentence and miss out a word they might not remember. Others might use it to get ideas. Another way wildcards can be used is by using a single word to substitute other, so if you are using "choke " for example, that could substitute to mean choking,choker basically giving different variation of the word. The advantage of this is that it saves time. Rather than you typing in the three different variation of the word.
Unfortunately not many search engines offer wildcard ,even google doesn't offer wildcard but does do it automatically for you sometimes. But other search engines such as yahoo would simply show nothing when searching a phrase with a few missing words. Since these are original
Quotes
Quotes in search is when you put quotation marks in your phrase/sentence.
It's incredibly useful for when you want your the search engine to display sites that have your phrase in the exact same order. Accordingly if searched "telescopes for christmas". Instead of getting sites maybe with only the key word christmas or christmas on part of a paragraph while telescopes is in a corresponding paragraph. I can get sites which has the phrase in the exact order. There are several advantages. One, if a site has your phrase in the order you searched it, it likely the site is displaying information your looking for. Secondly it more likely the sites displayed are going to have some relevance to what your looking, so makes your search more efficient and richer in information.
Thirdly it doesn't treat your term as two separate entitles, in conjunction doesn't treat the word "telescope" and " christmas" different such as a website having a page solely dedicated to christmas but having no mention of telescopes.
Using quotes for in searches can also be combined with the Boolean operators. As searching " telescopes AND christmas" will almost guarantee me a page contain christmas and telescopes and at the same time having the words connected to each other. Also using NOT helps, as again if i typed with quotation marks " telescopes for christmas NOT decoration" this will filter out any sites connecting christmas with decoration and sites focusing on gifts with a section of telecopies.
When you add quotes to your search, it usually changes the amount of searches available quite dramatically. Take this example :
As you can see, when you type in “holiday in NYC “ you come up with four hundred than eighty one million results in zero point sixty four seconds. This is a large amount of webpages. But as you see in the second picture. The results are dramatically lowered to sixty three thousand results, When quotes are added to the search. In essence, you can see the impact that adding quotes does to to your search. It filters out all the website that don’t contain the following search in the exact order it was searched.
Advanced search option
Advanced options are used to refine the search. Like the librarian scenario i mentioned on the boloens operators paragraph. Advanced setting helps try to get exactly what your looking for. For example, google gives an automatic option of Boolean operators.
In google advance search option it offers an option of adding the AND, NOT and OR operators together. So if you wanted to include these in your search "basketball items and "football items NOT rounders items) OR NBA items AND premier league items. Google automatically organizes your search in this order to make it easier for the user to organize a complex boloens operation. Google also presents the option of limiting the reading level from advance reading level to basic reading level. Other advanced search options offer a large selection language to translate the results.
Making it open for people all over the world.
And lastly, you can filter out the amount of content you want displayed on your search results. There are three levels of filter contents with the most common three being safe search,moderate search and safe search off. The safe search option, strictly filters out all inappropriate content. While the moderate setting is in the middle so has some inappropriate, but some is filter out if too extreme. And lastly you have the non safe search, which doesn’t filter out any inappropriate content whatsoever. Lastly you can filter out the results match only website operating within your country or area. This can be useful for people looking for maybe a local job, a club pr society and wants to filter out all contents coming from Australia, America, and even narrow it down to places only in Nottingham for example.
Conclusion
To conclude, Web-crawlers show a variety of information involving NYC, from maps to pictures to guides and wikis. This is array of information that would useful to many people looking to know about New york city. On the other hand, Dmoz(directory search engine) shows a organized looking files on information on new york. It also shows a little less information the the web crawler search. As you can see in the picture the webs-crawler also includes more maps on how to get to new york, while the directory doesn’t. It also has less results than the web-crawler. The dog-pile( meta search engine) shows a very similar results to that of web-crawler. Its also ordered in the exact same way.
Lastly ask kids search engine shows relatively different results compared to the other search engine. If you look at the results you would see that they show more educational information about new york city and documentaries. While the other search engines focus on holidays and tours in NYC.
