1. What is a spider? What does it do?
Spider is a program that automatically fetches web pages. It is also named as Web Crawler. It is used to feed pages to search engines. It’s called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Because most web pages contain links to other pages, a spider can start almost anywhere. As soon as it sees a link to another page, it goes off and fetches it.
Large search engines, like Google,yahoo have many spiders working in parallel.
Reference:Spider. Retrieving on 16 May 2009 from http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/s/spider.html
2. What is a meta-search engine? Provide some examples.
Meta-search engine is a search engine, which would pass the search requests to various popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo and etc , simultaneously for processing. Results from each search engines would be consolidated and presented to the client grouped by their search criteria.
Eg :
Dogpie www.dogpile.com, Mama www.mamma.com and Limewire www.limewire.com
3. How can you get your site listed at major search sites; and how could you improve your site ranking?
- Add the website to famous search engines by paying the annual subscribtions.
- Add some key words to the main page.
To improve site in the rankings site should use meaningful headings to their web pages.
minimizing broken links , and increasing quality of sublinks in the webpages would improve site performance and may increase the rankings of the site.
Reference;
Berkeley, UC. (2008). Meta-search engines. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html.
Heng, C. (n.d.) How to improve your search engine ranking on Google. Retrieved May 29, 2009 from http://www.thesitewizard.com/archive/google.shtml.
