Search Engine
Search engines are web sites that are designed to allow you to search across the web. Search engines are a type of infomediary. Google is now clearly the most popular search engine. It trumped Altavista due to better results based on its PageRank algorithm. Yahoo! is a distant second. Amazon's A9 search engine is emerging as an interesting alternative. Among its features, it takes into account a user's previous search behaviour in an attempt to personalize the search. Search engines rely on web designers to submit their pages to the engine, and on a spider that crawls the web to identify new sites. Search Engine Optimization is becoming a critical internet marketing activity. Search is one of the most popular acitivities on the web for web surfers. It is second only to e-mail, 90% of internet users performing searches. US usage has grown 55% from 2004 to 2005. Search engines are an increasingly popular source of advertising space. Since people are using search engines to seek out information and go elsewhere on the web, this fits with hypertext advertisements. Emerging search engine advertising programs include Google Adwords and Yahoo! / Overture (which was goto.com the pioneer of ppc search engine advertising). These are PPC advertising programs that host text advertisements. Traditional search engines provide results based on the relevancy of the site to the keywords searched. Blog entries will also appear among the results in the traditional search engines, however there are blog search engines that only search the blogosphere. These search engines base their output on time. The most recent entry written, that includes the keyword, is thus the first entry returned. Major blog engines include Technorati, Google Blog Search and Feedster.
Maximizing Business Potential
