1 Good Reason - Internet Marketing

Using Search Engines

By: Chris Kieff

Have you ever searched for something on the internet and not found it? Something that’s maybe a little unusual but should definately have a few sites that discuss the subject. Perhaps you’ve used the wrong search engine. You may have gotten 100’s of thousands of responses and grown tired of reading through page after page of unrelated information. Or you may have gotten that baffling “Your Search Returned 0 Results” message.

Many of us fall into the habit of only using a single search engine for every one of our searches. That’s like using a fork to eat every food- it can be done, but you’ll get much more satisfying results if you use all of the utensils available to you. Here’s a quick primer:

Google

Yahoo

MSN

Yahoo, is a search engine that is managed and edited by people. That means for a site to be listed on Yahoo, a real human at their offices has visited the site and looked at it with human eyeballs. This naturally limits the number of sites that can be listed by Yahoo and also limits their selection.

Google, is a web crawler robot. That means they created a machine that spends 100% of it’s time looking at sites and creating an index of the information on these sites. Humans very rarely become involved with the site listing process at Google, with one notable exception to be discussed a little later. Google offers tremendous selection and diversity but requires more input from the searcher to obtain a manageable list in response to their inquiry.

MSN is a hybrid that uses a little of both techniques and results from other search engines as they see fit.

All of the major search engines accept advertising, and automatically add the advertisers site to top of the list of the search results. However, they can usually be identified; The images above show search results from Google, MSN and Yahoo and help you identify the paid advertising, usually listed as “Sponsors.” Remember that they are paid advertisements and you will be informed before you click.

The bottom line?

Use Google or other web-bot crawlers for specific objective searches. Looking for the left front doodad on a 1964 thingy-ma-bob. Use lots of words in your search phrase to reduce the number of responses.

Use Yahoo and other people monitored searches when you are looking for more subjective searches. If you want the best restaurant reviews in another city, or a good way to begin a new hobby, etc. Still use more words than less in your searches, and always go at least two or three pages deep into the results so you can find the second tier of sites- which is often where you will find the best stuff.