search engines : Java Glossary

Introduction

My personal favourite is Google. It weeds out the trash and goes straight for the gold. If you are looking for a particular class of product, give the name of several examples rather than trying to describe the category. About 40% of people use Yahoo, which is not a true search engine. It in more a catalog of webpages, manually created. Microsoft’s Bing is in third place.

Legend

Search Engine Sites

List of search engines and how you can subit your website to them.

Name	URL (Uniform Resource Locator)	Submit	Notes
	goodsearch.com		Donates to your selected charity when you use it. You can add your favourite charity to its list. Powered by Yahoo. Has an optional toolbar. It tracks your previous choice of favourite charity with a cookie.
	www.google.com (USA) www.google.ca (Canada) www.google.fr (France) www.google.de (Germany) www.google.ie(Ireland) www.google.co.in (India) www.google.co.il (Israel) www.google.it (Italy) www.google.co.jp (Japan) www.google.co.nz (NZ) www.google.ru (Russia) www.google.es (Spain) www.google.se (Sweden) www.google.co.uk (UK) others	(add USA)	Details on Google search
Yahoo	www.yahoo.com		Has an organised library-like directory structure, not just keyword search. Sometimes free, but sometimes you must pay (or if there is any adult content to be listed). I think they are cutting their throats with these extremely high fees. It takes them 8 to 12 weeks to index your site. See the suggest a site button on each page of the category tree to submit.
	Bing.com	does not accept submissions	Microsoft’s search engine. Lets you search the web, images, videos, newsgroups and maps. How Bing differs from Google
	www.about.com	(add)	human guides, categories and subcategorise links.
All The Web	www.alltheweb.com	(add)	Good for finding very obscure entries. aka FAST. They now get their data from Yahoo.
	www.altavista.com	(add)	Very large database — indexes everything on the web pages, not just the keywords. Popular with job recruiters. Tends to overwhelm. No longer has a free personal version called Discovery for searching your own hard disks. Buried on the main menu, on the left bottom, in tiny type, is submit a URL to submit your web pages for indexing. It takes one to two weeks for them to index your site.
	www.altavistacanada.com	(add)	Like Altavista, but with more emphasis on Canadian content. Buried on the main menu, on the left, in tiny type, is add a URL to submit your web pages for indexing.
	search.aol.com	(add)	I could not figure out how to add an URL.
	www.ask.com	(add)	Née AskJeeves. I quite like this site because it collects data from several other search engines and filters out most of the junk. The owners have also done quite a bit of work organising answers to common queries pointing you right away to a good site. I found it most useful for example for researching holidays. To submit a URL you write to url@ask.com and a human decides if, where and how to include it in Jeeve’s database of questions.
CodeEchange	CodeExchange.ics.uci.edu		Specialised for finding Java code.
Copernic	copernic.com		It uses mama.com which queries other search engines. The image search is particularly good. Ties into the Copernic desktop search to index and search your desktop machine.
DMOZ	dmoz.org	(add)	Has a Yahoo-like manual category system.
Dogpile	www.dogpile.com		Works by asking other search engines in parallel to look. Does not accept submissions.
	www.excite.com	(add)	Slightly cleverer at putting most important hits first better than Altavista. Excite the company is buying up other search Engine companies such as Magellan. Excite also sells search engines to sites that want an index just of their site. The add your site link is very easy to overlook. It is just below the thin horizontal blue line. It takes two to six weeks for them to index your site.
	FindThatFile		For finding downloadable files, not HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) text.
Go Network	www.go.com	(add)
HotBot	www.hotbot.com	(add)	Now associated with either Ask Jeeve or Google. Formerly associated with Lycos.
Infoseek	www.infoseek.com	(add)	Defunct now Go.com.
InfoSpace	www.infospace.com	(add)
iWon	www.iWon.com	(add)	a sort of Publisher’s Clearing house prize site.
LookSmart	www.looksmart.com	(add)
Lycos	www.lycos.com	(add)	Grandfather of all search engines. It takes two to six weeks for them to index your site. Lycos (and brothers) form the second largest database, second only to Google. However, it refreshes it’s 2.1 billion pages every nine to eleven days. It now collapses multiple hits to the same website to one hit per website.
Lycos Germany	www.lycos.de	(add)	Only for Germany
Lycos Italia	www.lycos.it	(add)	Only for Italy
InFind			defunct.
MapPlanet	www.mapplanet.com	(add)	Find things by latitude and longitude on a map. You can claim a cell for your web page.
MSN (Microsoft Network)	search.msn.com	(add)
Northern Light	www.northernlight.com		Now a subscription based business news engine.
PlanetOcean	www.searchenginenews.com		Search Engine News, paid journal
Search.com	www.search.com	(add)	Searches through 200 search engines, auctions and newsgroups. Née SavvySearch. The ultimate domain name for a search engine.
SearchHound	www.searchhound.com		Must pay to list. Search rankings given to the highest bidder.
	www.sympatico.msn.ca		Has optional Canada-only filter. Lycos/MSN affiliate. Requires cookies turned on. Does not appear to accept submissions.
Zaba Search	zabasearch.com	(add)	Formerly the YellowPages
Torrentz	www.torrentz.com	(add)	a search engine for BitTorrents
WebCrawler	www.webcrawler.com	(add)	originally owned by AOL (America Online), now part of Excite. It takes two to six weeks for them to index your site.

Obscure and National Search Engines

Set Up Your Own Search Engine

Services To Submit Your Website to Multiple Search Engines

•   NeedHits
• Submit-It
• Register-It
• WebPromote

googod.net offers a service to optimise your site to raise its ranking in the search engines.

Robots

<META name=robots content=noindex, nofollow>

• NOINDEX prevents anything on the page from being indexed.
• NOFOLLOW prevents the crawler from following the links on the page and indexing the linked pages.
• NOIMAGEINDEX prevents the images on the page from being indexed but the text on the page can still be indexed.
• NOIMAGECLICK prevents the use of links directly to the images, instead there will only be a link to the page.

user-agent: * # directed to all robots
Disallow: zips # whatever directory/file you don’t want indexed.

Rant

• Whenever you got a 404 not found error, or a page moved, your browser would automatically notify the search engine, so it would not waste other people’s time sending them there.
• The browser could record how much time you spent looking at various pages. It could tell the search engine which pages were obviously not what you were looking for so it could refine its ordering for other people doing similar searches.
• You could search for pictures, specifying format or size and possibly even such things as dominant colour or complexity of the image. Since I first wrote this, image.google.com was born.
• There would be a uniform way to submit your websites and pages to the various search engines. Submitting your site to all the search engines in the universe could be painless as broadcasting DNS (Domain Name Service) is now.
• You might be able to embed information for the search engines right in your HTML documents, e.g. Yahoo categories, so they get automatically maintained just my maintaining your HTML documents.
• The DT tag is very powerful. When you look up something quite often you want a definition. When you search you should be able to limit the hits to definitions of the term you are looking for. There should be other ways of hinting to the search engine that a usage is a definition not using the DT format. Since I first wrote this, Google has implemented the definition: tag to request a definition of the following word.
• When you search for a group of words in a search engine, your browser would know the list of words you were searching for and could highlight them or let you search for any of them with a single keystroke. Since I first wrote this, Google has implemented this feature, but only for PDF (Portable Document Format) documents displayed as HTML.

Meta Words

Consider these sorts of question:

• When was the Battle of Hastings?
• What does ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line technology) stand for?
• What is the difference between a CD (Compact Disc) recordable and a CD rewriteable?
• What does uuencode mean?
• Where can I buy an HP (Hewlett Packard) 6630 RAM (Random Access Memory) module?

• when Battle of Hastings
• acronym definition ADSL
• difference CD recordable CD rewritable
• definition uuencode
• where buy HP 6630 RAM
• what is Roedy Green’s email address?
• Has Robert Roshon authored anything on the history of gay lib in the 1970s?

Users could start using metawords without any change to their current habits. They are likely already including them unaware they are being ignored.