How Search Engines Work

There are four big search engines. Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask. They cover just about all searches ever done online.

Search engines actually have a series of parts or functions.

Firstly they have to find web sites, and they can do this in 2 different ways. There are crawler or spider based search engines and human powered search engines. Crawler based search engines have automatic programs that crawl the web looking at web pages and following links to other web pages. Human powered search engines rely on an army of people reading submissions of web sites from people like me, looking at the web site and deciding on a category for that web site.

Once the search engine knows that the site exists it adds it to its index. The index is simply a huge database of information about every single web site it has ever found, billions of the things.

The final job of the search engine is to take searches and present results, something that they do literally billions of times every day.

All quite simple so far?

The critical bit as far as any web site owner is concerned is the third bit, presenting the results. Why? Because the Internet is huge, even for the simplest results you get millions of responses. Because you get millions of responses you have to rank the results in some kind of order. Ranking the results is complicated... very complicated.

The search engine looks at where in your website certain keywords specified in the search occur. They will look near the top of the body text, in headings, page titles, descriptions of pictures and links. The frequency and positioning of the words all makes a difference.

Each search engine also adds it's own different factors to the ranking process, a lot of them are a closely and carefully guarded secret. One of these is Google's page rank technology. This is can be summed up by saying "the more web sites that link to yours the better" This is something you can organise for free, but makes a huge difference to your web site's page ranking.

Googlebase

Do you want to get your products into Google in a nice uncluttered, straightforward and inexpensive way?

Googlebase allows you to add details of your products or services to Google, independent of your web site. Google then make the details search-able and adds them to their index. All clever stuff.

What's the benefit?

Well it short-circuits the process of getting your products and services into Google. Normally Google would go through your site starting with the home page and working its way through the various pages on the site. Eventually it will work down to individual products and it will index the products and product details. You then have the whole process of ranking your product pages alongside all the other pages that might come up in a person's search. Also if your product details are stored in a database and fed into your web site then this can upset the whole process and mean that Google only has the sketchiest of details of your products.

With Googlebase you cut straight through all of that and go straight to the product, details, price and pictures of the product. Your products could appear in Google, Google product search or Google Maps. In Google Product Search they are ranked alongside any other supplier that sells a similar product and has their products in Googlebase.

It's still early days but it looks to be an excellent web application with a lot of potential.

How do you get your products into Googlebase?

At the simplest level you have a form to fill in with the details of your product. It's easy, quick and doesn't take long and you can do it yourself. They recommend this if you have 10 items or fewer. If you have more then they recommend bulk uploading options. This is where we come in. We create a bulk upload file of all your relevant product detail , that is in a format that Googlebase recognises. We then upload that file to Googlebase and they process all of the information and create a series of products. If all of your product details are stored in a database we can write a small program that will link the database to Googlebase and so your products and their details will keep in sync.

Just Contact Us for details.