There are two kinds of search results: paid results and organic (or natural) results that Most search engines, these days, return two types of results whenever you click Search:
Natural/Organic:The 'Real' Search Results (Often Called 'SERPs' for Search Engine Results Pages)
Organic search results are listings on search engine results pages that appear because of their relevance to the search terms. This relevance is calculated by criteria such as extent of keyword match and number of sites linking to that website. You can only get a high ranking if your content is seen as relevant and important by the search engines.
Paid: Pure Advertising
This is how the search engines make their money. Advertisers pay the search engines to display their ad whenever someone searches for a word that is related to their product or service. The most widely used form of paid listing is Pay Per Click (PPC), where you pay each time someone clicks on the link in your advertisement. The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the ads are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background colour and/or placement on the page.
Figure Natural / organic search results v paid ads
When people use search engines, they normally pay a lot more attention to the natural results than the paid results because they know these results are more relevant (and they know the "Sponsored Links" are simply ads).
Which is more effective?
For most industries, the natural results are significantly more effective:
Organic search results are free. Unlike paid campaigns, there is no direct cost involved to get your website listed in organic search results.
Organic results get clicked 8½ times as often as paid listings excluding search results that have no paid ads.
In the search engine list below, We provides a guide to the major search engines of the web. Why are these considered to be "major" search engines? Because they are either well-known or well-used.
Google
Google search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and is the most-used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1997.
Google Search provides more than 22 special features beyond the original word-search capability. These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps, earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores.
Google provides the option to find more than web pages, however. Using on the top of the search box on the Google home page, you can easily seek out images from across the web, discussions that are taking place on Usenet newsgroups, locate news information or perform product searching.
A Google search-results page is ordered by a priority rank called a "PageRank" which is kept secret to prevent spammers from forcing their pages to the top. Google Search provides many options for customized search (see below: Search options), such as: exclusion ("-xx"), inclusion ("+xx"), alternatives ("xx OR yy"), and wildcard ("x * x").
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December 2009, the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.29%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and before Bing at 3.27%, according to Net Applications.
In addition to excellent search results, you can use tabs above the search box on the Yahoo home page to seek images, Yellow Page listings or use Yahoo's excellent shopping search engine. Or visit the Yahoo Search home page, where even more specialized search options are offered.
Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would send queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of sites. The results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand. Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by Yahoo! itself. In 2001 the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and later was powered by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent. Yahoo! Search major competitors are: Google Search, Bing and Ask Search.
Like Google, Yahoo sells paid placement advertising links that appear on its own site and which are distributed to others. Yahoo purchased Overture in October 2003.
On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power Yahoo! Search.
Bing
Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is the current web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with a preview version released on June 1, 2009.
Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered and a list of related searches (called "Explorer pane") based on semantic technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008. As of January 2010[update] Bing is the third largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 3.16%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and Yahoo at 6.15%, according to Net Applications.
Ask
Ask.com (or Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom) is a search engine founded in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California. The original search engine software was implemented by Gary Chevsky from his own design. Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website around that core engine.
Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the "natural language" search engine that let you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything. In 2001, Ask acquired Teoma's unique index and search relevancy technology. Teoma was based upon the clustering concept of subject-specific popularity.
Today, Ask depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users. These results come from the Teoma algorithm, now known as ExpertRank.
AOL Search
AOL Inc., formerly known as America Online is an American global Internet services and media company. AOL is best known for its online software suite, also called AOL, that allowed millions of customers around the world to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the internet as a whole.
AOL Search provides users with editorial listings that come Google's crawler-based index. Indeed, the same search on Google and AOL Search will come up with very similar matches.The "internal" version of AOL Search provides links to content only available within the AOL online service. In this way, you can search AOL and the entire web at the same time. The "external" version lacks these links. Why wouldn't you use AOL Search? If you like Google, many of Google's features such as "cached" pages are not offered by AOL Search.
HotBot
HotBot is one of the early Internet search engines and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired Magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a short time, and it was taken down without any notice to its users. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results.
HotBot provides easy access to the web's three major crawler-based search engines: Yahoo, Google and Teoma. Unlike a meta search engine, it cannot blend the results from all of these crawlers together. Nevertheless, it's a fast, easy way to get different web search "opinions" in one place.
AllTheWeb
AlltheWeb is an Internet search engine (Powered by Yahoo) that made its debut in mid-1999. You may find AllTheWeb a lighter, more customizable and pleasant "pure search" experience than you get at Yahoo itself. The focus is on web search, but news, picture, video, MP3 and FTP search are also offered.
AlltheWeb had a few advantages over Google, such as a fresher database, more advanced search features, search clustering and a completely customizable look.
You know how important it is to score high in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Page). But your site isn't featuring on the first three pages, and you don't understand why? It could be that you're confusing the web crawlers trying to index it. How can you find out?
In order to achieve a useful level of website optimization, it is essential to understand how search engines operate and how they arrive at their results.
Search engines work in a number of different ways that directly relate to search engine optimization:
1. Crawling the Web
Search engines run automated programs, called "bots" or "spiders" or "crawlers" that use the hyperlink structure of the web to "crawl" the pages and documents that make up the World Wide Web. Spiders only can follow links from one page to another and from one site to another. That is the primary reason why links to your site (inbound links) are so important. Links to your website from other websites will give the search engine spiders more "food" to chew on.
Spiders find Web pages by following links from other Web pages, but you can also submit your Web pages directly to a search engine or directory and request a visit by their spider. It can be useful to submit your URL straight to the various search engines; but spider-based engines will usually pick up your site regardless of whether or not you've submitted it to a search engine.
2. Indexing Documents
Once pages & Web addresses have been crawled or collected, sent to the search engine's indexing software. The indexing software extracts information from the documents, storing it in database. The kind of information indexed depends on particular search engine. Some index every word in a document; others index the document title only.
3. Processing Queries
When you perform a search by entering keywords, Search engines match queries against an index that they create and assembles a web page that lists the results as hypertext links. The index consists of the words in each document, plus pointers to their locations within the documents. This is called an inverted file.
4. Ranking Results
Once the search engine has determined which results are a match for the query, the engine's algorithm (a mathematical equation commonly used for sorting) runs calculations on each of the results to determine which is most relevant to the given query. They sort these on the results pages in order from most relevant to least so that users can make a choice about which to select.
Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Certain types of navigation may hinder or entirely prevent search engines from reaching your website's content:
Speed Bumps & Walls
Complex links and deep site structures with little unique content may serve as "bumps". Data that cannot be accessed by spiderable links qualify as "walls".
Possible "Speed Bumps" for SE Spiders:
* URLs with 2+ dynamic parameters; i.e. http://www.url.com/page.php?id=4&CK=34rr&User=%Tom% (spiders may be reluctant to crawl complex URLs like this because they often result in errors with non-human visitors).
* Pages with more than 100 unique links to other pages on the site (spiders may not follow each one).
* Pages buried more than 3 clicks/links from the home page of a website (unless there are many other external links pointing to the site, spiders will often ignore deep pages).
* Pages requiring a "Session ID" or Cookie to enable navigation (spiders may not be able to retain these elements as a browser user can).
* Pages that are split into "frames" can hinder crawling and cause confusion about which pages to rank in the results.
Possible "Walls" for SE Spiders:
* Pages accessible only via a select form and submit button.
* Pages requiring a drop down menu (HTML attribute) to access them.
* Documents accessible only via a search box.
* Documents blocked purposefully (via a robots meta tag or robots.txt file - see more on these here).
* Pages requiring a login.
* Pages that re-direct before showing content (search engines call this cloaking or bait-and-switch and may actually ban sites that use this tactic.
The key to ensuring that a site's contents are fully crawlable is to provide direct, HTML links to to each page you want the search engine spiders to index. Remember that if a page cannot be accessed from the home page (where most spiders are likely to start their crawl) it is likely that it will not be indexed by the search engines. A sitemap can be of tremendous help for this purpose.
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