Search Definitions
Learn what Search words mean and how to use them
Spider
Term for computer program operated by a search engine company that
is used to visit pages on the internet, record information about
words and keywords on the page, and store the data in an archive
or index.
Search Engine
A website that organizes webpages according to keywords, and relevancy
to deliver choices to a web user in response to his or her individual
search query terms.
Query or
Search
This process is composed of entering keywords related to ones interest
at the moment in a given search engine's search box and retrieving
the results. Every time one enters a new keyword a new query or
search is occuring. One does not have to click on a result from
a query for it to count as a query or search.
Proximity
Search
Term for a specialized search in which one can search for a given
phrase found together such as "cars for sale" specifically.
A proximity search will deliver a phrase found together while ignoring
the individual keywords if they are found far away from each other
on a page.
Relevancy
Subjective term referring to the relative quality of search engine
results in response to a given user's query. A search engine that
results in more searchers finding what they want for a given search
has a greater relevancy.
Stemming
Term for a practice by search engines that results in root words
and their endings resulting in the same results being returned from
a search engine. For example a search for car or cars in many engines
due to stemming would return the same result. For terms such as
walk walking and walked via stemming some search engines would return
the same search results.
Case Sensitive
Term for a practice deployed by some search engines in the past
that results in capitalized and lower case words yielding different
results. For example a case sensitive search engine would return
different results for CAR and car.
Stop Words
Common words like of, and, the, but that are found often in documents
and as such are not used as keywords by search engines for ranking
purposes. In short the words are ignored.
SERPS
Acronym for Search Engine Result Pages which is frequently used
by search engine optimizers to refer to the actual search engine
results. For example saying a given engine has updated SERPS means
the search engine now delivers different results than previously
due to a larger number of pages in the search engine index, changes
in relevancy ranking, or for some other reason.
Googling
Term for the practice where by someone types another person's name
in the Google search engine to see just what pops up. Googling often
includes a person searching for their own name or searching for
another name to see if anything "interesting" pops up.
Google Dance
Term frequently used by members of the Webmasterworld Message Board
that is used to refer to the time during which Google is in the
middle of its monthly update. During this time period search queries
may result in differeint results from time to time and all three
Google's Google1, Google 2 and Google 3 which are used for testing
purposes and can be used to see how the update may be affecting
how things are ranked.
Google Bombing
This term refers to the use of linking campaigns designed to make
a given site appear under a given keyword sometimes negatively.
If lots of sites link to a given site with text surrounding the
link containing a negative keyword then the site itself will appear
higher in google results for that negative term through no action
of their own. For example if lots of sites link to a given company
and describe it as "Evil Company" then the company could
be associated with evil just by its prominent return in search engine
results on Google.
Cloaking
Term referring to a practice used by search engine optimizers in
which a different keyword rich page is delivered to search engine
spiders while the regular real page is delivered to actual human
visitors. With cloaking the ip of a visitor to a site determines
what version of a page it receives. Ip's from search engines get
mathematically optimized keyword pages while surfers get regular
pages. Using Ip's to determine content delviered is known as Ip
based delivering ad it used during cloaking. Site's found to be
cloaking are often dropped from search engines entirely as the process
is considered dishonest.
Invisible
Text
This refers to the use of text in a color that can not be seen relative
to the background of a site or text too smale for a human to be
able to see. Invisible text is used by some in an attempt to gain
additional keywords to rank for on search engines. Search engines
generally lower the rankings of sites they find doing this.
Metasearch
Term for a search engine that gets its results from multiple search
engines and combines them in some format that in theory would take
the best results from multiple search engines for a presentation
of the best overall results.
Web Directory
Term for a category based organized scheme of the web usually maintained
by humans. Popular webdirectories include Yahoo, Zeal/Looksmart,
and ODP.
ODP
Acronym for the Open Directory Project which is owned by AOL/Netscape
and consists today as a volunteer run directory of the web with
a few AOL/Netscape staff overseeing the project. ODP data can be
used freely with copyright credit given and is in wide use on search
engines such as Gooogle, AOL, and Netscape and that gives the directory
its importance.
Zeal
Term for the noncommerical portions of the Looksmart directory that
are maintained by volunteer editors known as Zealots along with
paid Looksmart editors. Zeal is the only way for noncommercial sites
to get into Looksmart and consequently gain prominence on MSN search
which uses Looksmart data.
Robots.txt
Term for a file placed on ones website or webserver that will block
almost all search engines from visiting the pages of the site or
server if set up appropriately or it can block selective search
engines or rogue spiders. Just a text file named Robots.txt specifying
the robots or search engine spiders to be ignored in a format as
explained at http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/exclusion-admin.html is
enough to limit search engines from further visiting a site. Robots.txt
files are mainly used to limit search engines from viewing too many
pages on a site if search engine visits and not real visitors are
taking the majority of a site's resources. If you want traffic from
search engines you should not upload a file named Robots.txt file
anywhere on your site.
Anchor Text
Term for the linked text description of a hyperlink to another website.
For example the fake link A really bad site has "a really bad
site" as the anchor text which leads to the actual site which
is fake in this instance. The anchor text heavily influences the
keywords the site will rank well on for search engines like google.
If lots of sites link to this site with the same anchor text then
the site might appear very prominenty for the phrase "a really
bad site."
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