Week 7 and 8 Flashcards
what are the two parts of how a search engine works
- building the search database
2. Returning the pages to the searcher
when marketing your website, do 2 things
- make your page within the top 10 listed when your customers search using engines for your site
- include web address for your new site
what is the first part of how a search engine works and describe it
building the search database
- find all data on web and build a database
- web crawlers crawl the internet and finds related words
what do web crawlers do
they crawl the internet constantly going from webpage to webpage via links and looking at words on page to build an index
what is an index and where is it stored
contains an index contains an alphabetical list of the words, and on which page it was found, and where on the page it was found
Index is stored in a really big database Looks sort of like this: keyword Index: Page and position within page 20 africa 2 (title) 7 (… 19 27 30 3 (body, 2nd word, 8th word)
what is the second part of how search engines work and describe it
returning the pages to the searcher
search engine uses index to decide which pages has given keyword
each engine has different algorithms to decide which results to display (google = page rank)
what algorithm does google use to decide what output to display to the user after a search
Page rank algorithm that decides what order to present the info
before 1990, how did search engines work
no index, so you had to search everything in order to find something (needle in a haystack) (Archie/ File names only searched)
around 1990, how did search engines work
webpages were returned just by file name of the sites and titles stored in the index, but not the content
1991, how did search engines work
World Wide Web developed by Tim Berners Lee in Geneva Switzerland
key feature - must have hyperlinks
1994 how did search engines work
some software allowed the user to submit pages they wanted included in the index
the indexes that were built began to include all the data on the webpage (not just tile and URL)
1995 how did search engines work
Unlimited bandwidth for the first time
more intuitive searches (just by words not necessarily by categories)
more advanced searching techniques like Ca* would return Canada, Cats etc
Add url to index and it gets added within 24 hours
However, results were still returned randomly with basic techniques
*** 1996 ** what happened in search engines and who did it
Larry Page and Sergey Brin came up with “BackRub” (Later called page rank) algorithm to have less random search returns
Based on data that “analyzed the relationships between websites would produce better ranking of results than existing techniques which ranked results according to the number of times the search term appeared on a page”
How does Google’s page rank algorithm work
evaluates 2 factors:
How many links are there to a web page
◦ What is the quality of the linking sites (although a high
ranked page with LOTS of links on it may pass you less
because it is spread too thinly)
The algorithm gives each webpage returned from the keyword search a weight between 0 and 1
The higher the weight given to the page, the
more likely it is that this page will be
displayed first to you.
The more sites that link to you, the higher up you go on the ranking
also if a highly-ranked site links to your site, then you also get a higher ranking
how did search engines develop from earliest to most recent
earliest | Archie/File names only searched |
| — | — |
| second earliest | Gopher/contents indexed but returned in random order |
| second most recent | Yahoo/search directory(Categories that humans manually fill with appropriate pages |
| most recent | Google/search index |
page rank does NOT take into account
content of the page (thus frequent content updates don’t
improve Page Rank necessarily)
page rank algorithm ranks ___ not ___
webpages not websites
if you are caught cheating by making other fake sites that point to your site, google will
ban you from the entire index
what are 3 components to make your site visible on the results page on google
- text
- links
- popularity
what is SEO
search engine optimization
how to use TEXT to make your site visible on google
- identify crucial words (5 second test)
2. put keywords in best location (title, visible body, text around and in links, text that is above the fold)
where are good places to put keywords to make yourself visible to search engines
-
title,
Title Tag = considered most important by all search engines - visible body (text you can cut from a page and paste into notepad),
- text around and in links,
- text that is above the fold (above the point where you have to scroll down in order to see).
title tags can be ___ digits but search engines will only look at the first ___ digits of your title tag
100, 63
title tag is shown when people ___ your site
bookmark
title tag is what is shown as the ___ for all returned results
link
how to use BODY of webpage to make your site visible on google
- keyword prominance (text near top of the page)
- keyword proximity
- keyword density
what is keyword stuffing
hiding words that will attract attention. eg putting a bunch of tag words in meta tag or in white text behind white background
meta tag is no longer really considered anymore because of this
how to use LINK of webpage to make your site visible on google
links should be easy to navigate so spiders can search through your content easily and index all content
links should have keywords in it
what is hard for spiders to crawl through
- image maps
- javascript
- database driven web pages (ones with ?,&, etc in the url that are created CGI pages can be problematic)
- links in flash documents
- poorly written html
How to use POPULARITY COMPONENT to make your site visible on google
- Link popularityNot just getting many links to your site, the links to your
site must be high quality links! REMEMBER PAGERANK! - Click through popularity Measures how many times your site is clicked on
Measures how often a user returns to your site
Measures how long a user stays at your siteless weight on this cuz ppl use bots for it
how to increase your site popularity
Check your competitors web pages, try to
figure out why their site is ranked higher than
yours.,
you can also submit your page to google/submit yourcontent to see how good you rank
what do search insights tell us
what searches are popular and when
hwo can you use statistics to improve your site
use stats from ISP or from other online companies
its important to know what visitors like and dislike about your webpage so you can improve it
what is a hit counter
gives stats about your page and how many people have visited your page
if you dont want people to find your website
use noindex tag
you can put tag in your page that will prevent spiders from finding you
who invented the ARPANET and when
Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn in 1969
who invented HTML and when
Tim Burners Lee in 1990
who invented the URL and when
Tim Burners Lee in 1990
who invented Microsoft MS Docs and when
Bill gates and paul allen in 1981
who invented the World Wide Web and when
tim burners lee in 1990
who invented google and when
Sergey brin and Larry page in
1998
who invented apple and when
steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in 1976