October Table of Contents

• Do I Need to Submit My Site?
• Google Tests New Blog Search Engine
• What's the Real Purpose of the Search Engines?
• Where is Google Going?
  

Do I Need to Submit My Site?

You've probably seen those advertisements that promise to submit your site to 200 search engines (or more) for a nominal fee. All those advertisements are really telling you is that somebody doesn't know much about search engines, and/or they are looking for a few gullible souls. In reality, almost all of the search engine traffic now goes through about three search engines: Google, Yahoo, and MSN. If you are listed in these, you are probably listing in almost all of the free, or organic, engines. AOL Online, for example, uses the Google search engine.

The next question, then, is do I need to submit my web site to Google, Yahoo, and MSN? Each of these search engines has an option called something like "Add Your Site:". Should you add yours? First, let's see how the engines index your site.

The front-end part of the search engine is the crawler. It is constantly crawling the web, finding pages, and adding their content to an index database. The crawler finds pages using a link from an existing pages in the index. When the crawler finds new pages (using links from other pages), these pages are added to the index. Another program is scanning the index and identifying links on the pages in the index and feeding them back to the crawler in a process that adds more pages to the index. Your home page is generally added first, then it could be weeks before the crawler gets back and crawls down your home page to add the rest of your pages to the index. Of course, if other sites are pointing to other pages in your site the crawler will probably find these sooner.

The more complex part of the process follows next. The search engine has to evaluate the quality of your pages and site by following the links on your pages backwards to evaluate the quality of the pages pointing to you. It does this by evaluating the quality of the pages pointing to the pages pointing to the page that points to you. For example, the web site for Dell (dell.com) has over 20,700 links going into it in Google. Some of those are from a kid's web site that just got a computer and wants a link on his web site for the company that made it. Other links might be, for example, from Intel that makes the chips for Dell. Obviously, the Intel link is more important, and the search engine determines this by the large number of links going into the Intel site.

This is an oversimplification, of course, but does give some insights into how the engines work. In reality, there are over a hundred factors an engine like Geology uses to evaluate the importance of your pages for a given search request. The time required for your site to be initially crawled and put in the index isn't long - in most cases a few days if a prominent site is pointing to it. That is the gotcha. If you don't have a link pointing to your site, the engines will never find it. The time it takes for Google to properly evaluate your site and return it in searches on your keyword phrases is much longer - often six months or more. This is due to the fact that Google "sandboxes" your sites; that is, it puts your listing in a test area.

When you submit your site to the search engines, what you are doing is requesting the search engines to put your site in the list of links to be crawled. If you don't have any pages pointing to your site, however, the search engine can't give your page any value and it won't be returned in any results. In other words, in most situations submitting your site to the engines does nothing if the links into your site aren't there. You are better off spending your time getting those links. Then the search engine will automatically find you from those links.

Google Tests New Blog Search Engine

Google has just released a new blog search engine. You can get more information it at:

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/09/15/google.blogs.ap/index.html

You can try it at:

http://blogsearch.google.com/

Note: I still find Google's regular Good search engine for finding related blogs better than this blog searcher, but this searcher does bring up some interesting stuff and it's only beta at the moment.

What's the Real Purpose of the Search Engines?

"It was then that I learned that computers were built to make money, not minds."

We would do well to remember this quote today as you ponder how to get the search engines working for you. The name for these engines is even wrong. Most people think of the search engines as a tool for finding specific information that relates to a topic. All wrong. Google (to quote Eric Lindquist)) is really a media company that relies on the chaos of the Internet to match searches with advertiser pitches. When Microsoft announces it plans to beat Google at the search game, that's nothing but propaganda. What Microsoft is saying is that they plan to be a media company that matches searches with advertiser pitches, and do it better than Google. The game is always who can make the most profit.

Note: All of the existing major search engines started at universities as true search engines. Google and Yahoo started at Stanford, Inktomi is from the University of California, and Lycos is from Carnegie Mellon. All have gone commercial.

If you are serious about the search engines and want the best book on it, you want the book The Search by John Battelle that is just out: Order and/or Info

Where is Google Going?

In just seven years, Google, Inc has gone from a simple startup to a leading search engine with the major part of the search engine traffic and $7.1 billion dollars to spend where they will go next. Where will it go? The payroll is now 4200 employees, which is still small compared to Microsoft's 61,000 workers and $48 billion in cash. But even Microsoft is worried. They've lost some of their top people to Google and aren't happy about it. Here are some directions to watch:

• One of those people Google took from Microsoft was their key Windows' architect (Mark Lucovsky). Now look at the features Google is bringing out out, such as the Desktop. Google would love to take the desktop market from Microsoft. There would be an interesting twist in all probability. It would be a Web-hosted alternative to Windows.
• Google is beginning an alliance with Sun to provide web-based office applications such as a word processor, spreadsheet, and more. These will be competing with Microsoft's Office.
• Google's roiling out free Wi-Fi access, for now only in specific areas of the San Francisco Bay area. All your web traffic would be channeled through Google with this free WiFi. Based on this pilot program, this could expand to other cities. Guess what that means? You get free Internet access, they get to track everything you do.
• Another option might be for Google to purchase a big chunk of AOL Online to stop Microsoft's attempt for an alliance there. AOL Online is shifting to a free service, with income provided by advertising as with other search engines. AOL Online is a part of Time Warner, enabling Google to become more of a media company.

Where is all this going? The alliance of Google with Sun against Microsoft is a big clue that together they plan to try to tackle the Microsoft giant together. You can read more about this from David Kirkpatrick's article at the Fortune site:

http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,1114200,00.html?cnn=yes

At the present time Sun has only agreed to distribute the Google Toolbar to consumers who want it along with Sun’s own Java Runtime Environment (JRE). This is a small step, but an important one that could lead to Google providing free web-centric applications to compete with Microsoft's desktop applications. Sun's Jonathan Schwartz explains this at:

http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20051001

You use the applications free of charge. Google uses them to send you targeted ads.

And as far as the "big brother" experiment in San Francisco: Google has just filed a patent that indicates they are working on a method of monitoring all your actions. The purpose, of course, is to provide you with more targeted advertisements. For a copy of the patent application, see:

The Patent

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