I already said that SEO and make money online business are tight connected, in this post are summarized the most important informations about search engines functioning.
Online there are thousands of search engines (often shortened in SE), but just focus on the major ones: we definitely know Google.com, Yahoo.com, Bing.com (ex MSN Live Search), Altavista.com, Lycos.com; and also SE a little less famous like Nerooo.com and Cuil.com. These search engines are all independent, that means the results showed by each one is restrict to its search engine’s algorithm.
Then, there are SE affiliate to Google.com (AOL, Ask.com, Libero, etcetera), and this means that the results showed by them are the same results listed by Google for a date keyword typed. Like mirror sites. In few words, searching something in them is like doing it in Google.
At last there are even lesser famous SE sites, but still recognized, like:
- Yoozila (http://www.yoozila.com)
- Excite (http://www.excite.com)
- HotBot (http://www.hotbot.lycos.com)
- Searchme (http://www.searchme.com)
- Kartoo (http://www.kartoo.com)
- Mamma (http://www.mamma.com)
And apart from all the name cited above (probably I've forgotten some others), there are thousands of minor SE sites.
Three concepts key about SE importance in make money business and the reason that pushes a moneymaker would-be to study them:
a) A site optimized for SE is a powerful "tool" to make money online.
b) They form the flow that drive potential customers to your websites.
c) You can advertise on them, even if your site is not listed [paying a recurring amount of money]
[Extract from: Search Engine Manifesto]
Search Engines are internet special sites that are designed to help people find information previously added on other sites. There are differences in the ways the major Search Engines work, but they all perform three basic tasks:
- They search the Internet or select pieces of the Internet - based on important words
- They keep an index of the words they find and where they find them
- They allow users to look for words or combinations of words found in that index.
Search Engine will index hundreds of millions of pages, and respond to tens of millions of queries per day. To find information on the hundreds of millions of Web pages that exist, a Search Engine employs special program robots, called spiders, to build lists of the words found on Web sites.
When a spider is building its lists, the process is called web crawling.
In order to build and maintain a useful list of words, a spider have to look at a lot of pages. How does any spider start its crawling over the Web? The usual starting points are lists of heavily used servers and very popular pages. The spider will begin with a popular site, indexing the words on its pages and following every link found within the site. In this way, the spidering system quickly begins to travel, spreading out across the most widely used portions of the Web.
Once the spiders have completed the task of finding information on Web pages, the Search Engine must store the information in a way that makes it useful.
There are two key components involved in making the gathered data accessible to users:
- The information stored with the data
- The method by which the information is indexed.
In the simplest case, a Search Engine could just store the word and the URL where it was found. In reality, this would make for an engine of limited use, since there would be no way of telling whether the word was used in an important or a trivial way on the page, whether the word was used once or many times or whether the page contained links to other pages containing the word. In other words, there would be no way of building the ranking list that tries to present the most useful pages at the top of the list of search results.
To make for more useful results, most Search Engines store more than just the word and URL. A Search Engine might store the number of times that the word appears on a page. The engine might assign a weight to each entry, with increasing values assigned to words as they appear near the top of the document, in sub-headings, in links, in the META tags or in the title of the page. Each commercial Search Engine has a different formula for assigning weight to the words in its index. This is one of the reasons that a search for the same word on different Search Engines will produce different lists, with the pages presented in different orders.
An index has a single purpose: it allows information to be found as quickly as possible. There are quite a few ways for an index to be built, but one of the most effective ways is to build a hash table. In hashing, a formula is applied to attach a numerical value to each word.
The formula is designed to evenly distribute the entries across a predetermined number of divisions. This numerical distribution is different from the distribution of words across the alphabet, and that is the key to a hash table's effectiveness.
When a person requests a search on a keyword or phrase, the Search Engine software searches the index for relevant information. The software then provides a report back to the searcher with the most relevant web pages listed first.
Another way to make money online without a website and its complication: write post for money. There's nothing better than make money writing of things that we care about. Knowing English and grammar it may become a funnny and interesting part-time job.