Search Engine Terms S-Z

Scooter

The name of the Altavista search engine's spider.

 

Search Engine

A server or a collection of servers dedicated to indexing internet web pages, storing the results and returning lists of pages which match particular queries. The indexes are normally generated using spiders. Some of the major search engines are Altavista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos, Northern Light and Webcrawler. Note that Yahoo is a directory, not a search engine. The term Search Engine is also often used to describe both directories and search engines.

 

Searchking

A smaller search engine which allows visitors to vote on the relevance of the pages returned by their queries, thus ranking sites based on the opinions of searchers. Unlike some of the major search engines, there is good customer support. http://www.searchking.com.

 

Search Term

See Query.

 

Server

A computer, program or process which responds to requests for information from a client. On the internet, all web pages are held on servers. This includes those parts of the search engines and directories which are accessible from the internet.

 

Sidewinder

The name of the Infoseek search engine's spider.

 

Siphoning

The use of various means to steal another site's traffic. Techniques used include the wholesale copying of web pages (with the copied page altered slightly to direct visitors to a different site, and then registered with the search engines) and the use of keywords or keyword phrases "belonging" to other organisations, companies or web sites.

 

Site Hit

See hit.

 

Skewing

Artificially changing search engine results so that, for example, popular queries will return artificially created listings. Infoseek is currently experimenting with this technique, using a small group of reviewers to artificially force higher relevance for certain sites.

 

Slurp

The name of the spider used by Inktomi.

 

Snap!

A large directory. The URL is http://www.snap.com.

 

Sniffer

The name of the filter program used by the Infoseek search engine to prevent spamdexing. It detects multiple mirror pages, font and background spoofs, multiple title tags, keyword stuffing and possibly other types of spamdexing.

 

Spamdexing

The alteration or creation of a document with intent to deceive an electronic catalog or filing system. Any technique that increases the potential position of a site at the expense of the quality of the search engine's database can also be regarded as spamdexing - also known as spamming or spoofing.

 

Spamming

See spamdexing. Spamming is also used more generally to refer to the sending of unsolicited bulk electronic mail, and the search engine use is derived from this term.

 

Spider, Spyder

That part of a search engine which surfs the web, storing the URLs and indexing the keywords and text of each page it finds. Please refer to the Search Engine Watch SpiderSpotting Chart for details of individual spiders. See also Robot.

 

Spidering

The process of surfing the web, storing URLs and indexing keywords, links and text.

 

Typically, even the largest search engines cannot spider all of the pages on the net. This is due to the huge amount of data available, the speed at which the new data appears, the use of politeness windows and practical limits on the number of pages that can be visited in a given time . The search engines have to make compromises in order to visit as many sites as possible, and they do this in different ways. For example, some only index the home pages of each site, some only visit sites they're explicitly told about, and some make judgements about the importance of sites (from number and quality of inbound links) before "digging deeper" into the subpages of a site.

 

Splash page

Similar to a gateway page but provides an initial display which must be viewed before a visitor reaches the main page. This usually acts as a kind of "opening title" sequence, and can be extremely annoying.

 

Spoofing

See spamdexing.

 

SSI

Server Side Includes. Used (for example) to add dynamically generated content to a web page.

 

Stealth Script

A CGI script which switches page content depending on who or what is accessing the page. See agent name delivery.

 

Stemming

A function of some search engines and directories which allows results to be returned from some or all keywords based on the same stem as the keyword entered as a search term. For example, when stemming is switched on, a search for the word dance will return matches for any word whose stem is danc-, matching the keywords dance, dancer and dancing.

 

Stop Word

A word which is ignored in a query because the word is so commonly used that it makes no contribution to relevancy. Examples are common net words such as computer and web, and general words like get, I, me, the and you.

 

Submission Service

Any agent which submits your site to many search engines and directories. Useful to get listed with many of the minor search engines, but don't rely on such services to get listed with the major search engines. Many of these services are automatic and run from web sites. Others run off line. Some are free. Beware of supplying your email address to the so called FFA (free for all) services - you may receive lots of spam.

 

Title

The text contained between the start and end HTML tags of the same name. This text is associated with (but not displayed in) the web page containing these tags, and is displayed in a special position (usually at the top of the window) by the web browser.

 

Title text is important because it normally forms the link to the page from the search engine listings, and because the search engines pay special attention to the title text when indexing the page.

 

Don't confuse this text with heading text within the web page which often looks like the title. Usually this will be rendered either using the HTML heading tags or just rendered with a large font size.

 

Traffic

The visitors to a web page or web site. Also refers to the number of visitors, hits, accesses etc. over a given period.

 

Unique Visitor

A real visitor to a web site.

 

Web servers record the IP addresses of each visitor, and this is used to determine the number of real people who have visited a web site.

 

If for example, someone visits twenty pages within a web site, the server will count only one unique visitor (because the page accesses are all associated with the same IP address) but twenty page accesses.

 

See also hit and page view.

 

URL

Universal Resource Locator. An address which can specify any internet resource uniquely. The beginning of the address indicates the type of resource - e.g. http: for web pages, ftp: for file transfers, telnet: for computer login sessions or mailto: for e-mail addresses.

 

URL Submission

See Registration.

 

Virtual Domain

A domain hosted by a virtual server account.

 

Virtual Server

An account on a hosting company server, usually linked to its own domain. This provides an inexpensive way to run a web site with its own top level domain, and is usually indistinguishable from having a separate physical server, except that the virtual server may share an IP address with other virtual servers on the same machine. A virtual server account is fine for most uses, but will often be slower to respond than a physically separate server, and physical access to the machine will seldom be allowed. The cost of a virtual server account is a small fraction of that needed to run a real server, mainly because of the expense of the dedicated line needed to connect the server continuously to the rest of the net.

 

Voila

A search engine from France Telecom with interfaces in at least different languages and a mission to become one of the leading international engines. Their (international) English interface at http://www.voila.com/ is produced in collaboration with Reuters, Infospace and Looksmart. Their original French language interface is at http://www.voila.fr/

Web Copywriting

The writing of text especially for a web page. Similar to the writing of copy for any other type of publication, good web copywriting can have a great effect on search engine positioning, so it forms a major part of optimization.

 

Webcrawler

One of the largest search engines. The URL is http://www.webcrawler.com.

 

XML

Extensible Markup Language. A new language which promises more efficient data delivery over the web. XML does nothing itself - it must be implemented using 'parser' software or XSL.

 

XSL

Extensible Scripting Language - an XML style sheet language supported by the newer web browsers Internet Explorer 5 and Netscape 5.

Yahoo

Similar to a search engine, but with a database generated by hand, this is the world's most used directory of web sites. The main URL is http://www.yahoo.com. It is notoriously difficult to get listed in Yahoo and, once listed, even more difficult to get your listing changed or to get out! To increase the odds of getting listed, try the following:

• Select the three categories you want to be listed in very carefully. Consider the regional categories. Ensure that the categories match the content of your site.
• Apply to one of their local subsidiaries for your own country or city.
• Make sure that your site is well-designed and easy to navigate.
• Ensure your site has no dead links.
• Ensure that your pages download quickly.
• Provide good contact information on your site.

If you manage to get listed, keep the e-mail they send you. You can e-mail the same person subsequently to get your listing changed.