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| home > paid inclusion > search engine relationships > difference: search engines & directories | ||
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The Difference
Between Search Engines and Directories Both search engines and directories are commonly called "search engines" and users use both to find information. Both search engines and directories indexed information about web pages and they both present this information to searchers. In this respect they are similar. They are different, however, in the way they collect the information they present. Search engines employ spiders, software that visits websites and collects information from the web pages they visit. The spiders follow the links on web pages to find yet other pages and collect the information they find for inclusion into the search engine's index. If your web site has links from other web sites a search engine will eventually find your web site and include your information in its index. How the search engine ranks your web pages relative to other web pages with similar information is a function of the ranking algorithm the search engine uses. Google, Inktomi, and Teoma are examples of search engines. A directory, on the other hand, is a human-edited compilation of information available on the Web. An editor makes a decision whether or not to include your web pages in the directory's index. A directory does not send out spiders to crawl the web to collect information. Yahoo and DMOZ (Open Directory Project) are examples of directories. However, most of the commonly called "search engines" provide searchers with information collected by both search engines and directories. For example, Yahoo, a directory, has purchased Overture and Overture had previously purchased the search engine Inktomi. Yahoo now displays search results obtained through its own directory as well as through the Inktomi search engine. Prior to purchasing Overture, Yahoo displayed information from Google's index. The marketing arrangements among search engines and directories change. The goal of all the search engines and directories, in addition to assuring its own profitability, is to provide its searchers with the best search results. |
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