What is a search engine?

Search Engines and Directories

The search engines account for around 85% people of how people find websites. Just ask yourself when the last time you found a website for the first time without using Google, MSN or Yahoo!?

Once you build a Web site you must help people to find it and know what it is about. The internet is like a library, but the books are in no order and someone's turned the light off. How can you find what you want?

This is where search engines come in

They catalogue the library and deliver relevant topics when asked. There are over 6 billion pages on the Web. That's SIX BILLION - or one for nearly every person on the planet today and they are growing at the rate of over a million new pages each day, so you can start to see the scale of the task that the search engines have when they try to index all this information.

When people use a search engine such as Google, Yahoo! or Bing they are asking the search engine to find the most relevant information for that search. These are then displayed as results in the Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERPs).

Types of Search Engine

There are two different types of Search Engine. To put it simply, they are Directories (like DMOZ) and Search Engines like Google.

The directories are compiled by humans and split their subjects into categories whilst the search engines 'crawl' the web and index what they find. In either case, you need to tell it where to find your site in the first place (Search Engine Submission) and then what your site is about (Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)).