ONLINE OUTREACH
Survey of Research
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Notes from Web Promotion Reading
MISCELLANEOUS PROMOTION TECHNIQUES

EMAIL NEWSLETTER -- If you do update often, you could consider
starting an E-mail newsletter that visitors could subscribe. In it you
could inform about updates, and perhaps write some short articles
about things that are related to the topic of your site. You should keep
in mind that while a newsletter is a great way to get people to return
to your site (provided that you can get them to subscribe your
newsletter when they visit your pages for the first time), it's also A
LOT of work. Before starting one, think it over closely - do you have
the energy to compile an interesting newsletter each month? If you
decide to go on with the idea, remember to provide people with the
opportunity to also unsubscribe from the newsletter.

DISCUSSION FORUM -- If you're too lazy to start a newsletter, how
about adding a discussion forum to your site? A well-run, active forum
often creates a set of "regulars", who frequently visit the site. It can
also attract new visitors, if the forum is known for it's high quality.
Note that while a forum doesn't require nearly as much work as
running a newsletter, it still doesn't run by itself. You're going to have
to delete offensive and commercial postings and keep the forum on
topic. It also isn't a bad idea to write messages now and then to keep
the discussion active. A badly run forum can easily tarnish the
reputation of the rest of the site. In addition to traffic, your site has to
have a topic that calls for discussion; a page covering politics is usually
suitable for a forum, a page covering what is currently stored in your
freezer is not.

SWEEPSTAKES -- If you cannot spare the time to run a forum or a
newsletter, perhaps you could hold a sweepstakes each month, one
entry per person? If you can afford to cough up, let's say $100 for the
prize, people just might return to enter the sweepstakes month after
month. You can also get your site listed in the many places on the
Internet that list sweepstakes.

WEB ADDRESS – You must promote your web site everywhere, in the
mass media and in all contact you have with others. Your URL should
be included on all of your business stationary: business cards,
envelopes, invoices, catalogs, product samples, greeting cards, voicemail messages, and on signs in your store or office.
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
REFERENCE PUBLICATIONS – A search of “directory,” “web guide,”
and “yellow pages” in amazon.com reveals hundreds of hard copy
reference publications that provide listings for businesses,
professionals, and web sites. Some of these publications are intended
for the general public while others are designed for specific industries
and professional groups. In addition to directories, trade magazines
often publish special issues that are devoted to the review of web
sites. A good example is PC Novice’s “Guide to the Web’s Hidden
Treasures on the Internet.” Do a search on the web to look for
magazines and publications that review topics related to your web site.
A good place to start is with the Oxbridge Communication’s Media
Finder (www.mediafinder.com).

WHAT’S NEW – A number of web site and newsgroups on the internet
are dedicated to letting you announce your new web site to the world.
Many of the popular commercial sites, such as Netscape and USA
Today, also provide a section called “What’s New” to entice their site
users with recommended sites. The submission requirements for
What’s New may be more rigid than those for a site listing request. In
addition to having a professional appearance, your site must also have
entertainment or educational value and appeal to a mass audience.
Here are some sample listings of what’s new sites and newsgroups:
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o

starting point – www.stpt.com
the today page – today.thingy.com
what’s new too – nu2.com
whatsnu.com
alt.best.of.internet
cern.www.talk
comp.infosystems.www.announce
comp.internet.net-happenings
misc.news.internet.announce
news.announce
news.announce.newusers
www.announce
AWARDS – A great way to gain attention for your site is to win one or
more of the thousands of awards on the web. Web awards might be
named Cool Site of the Week, Best of Web, Bob’s Pick, and so on. Here
are several popular awards sites:
o www.100hot.com
o www.2ask.com
o www.netguide.com
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o www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/ch.htm
o www.webbyawards.com

ASK USERS – Asking your site users to promote your site has become
very popular on the web. One technique used is “Tell a Friend” or
“Recommend this Site.” A reader who enjoys reading your page can
send that page to a friend by submitting the friend’s name and email
address in a form box.

WEB RINGS – A web ring consists of a number of sites addressing the
same topic or grouped together by some other binding factor. The
sites are usually linked in groups of five based on a common theme.
Each new ring page presents you with five more new linked sites until
all have been displayed. Currently there are three major organizers for
creating and maintaining web rings on the net: www.looplink.com,
www.ringsurf.com, and www.webring.com. Webring was the first and
is the largest.
TOOLS

PROMOTION TOOLKIT -- When you are ready to start your
promotion, build your promotion toolkit.
o A small GIF graphic, not animated, to represent your site. Stay
at under one inch high by two inches wide. Make it legible and
meaningful.
o A complete list of each page on your site that should be indexed.
With each page, have a meaningful title and a short description
(under 50 words) for the page. Some indexers require you to
input each page and some only need the home page and they
find the rest automatically.
o A description of your site in each of the following words counts:
 10 words
 15 words
 25 words
 35 words
 50 words
 75 words
 100 words
o A list of keywords for the site. Put them in order by their
importance, so that when you run into a site that doesn't allow
your full list, you can submit just the front portion of the
keyword list.
o Fully contact information:
 Company name
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 Address
 Phone numbers
 Fax number
 Contact name and email address
o The purpose of your site in three different word counts - 15, 30
and 75 words.
o A description of the audience for your site or its products.

TRACKING LISTINGS -- Another tool you will need is a method for
keeping track of all of your efforts at site promotion. You will want to
track each attempt you make. You need a quick way to go back to the
site and determine if they got you listed. If so, thank them. If not,
remind them again. When you have trouble getting listed, it will
usually turn out to be your fault. Read their FAQ and their rules again.
Find out what you are doing wrong. Maybe they don't list your type of
site. Maybe they limit listings to a specific industry.
I keep my efforts in a small 'flat file' data base (Filemaker Pro) that
allows me to add information each step of the way
o URL (address) of site
o Name of site (Yahoo, Joe Hot List ....)
o Date of initial submission
o Description of the site
o Description of my submission (category, etc.)
o Date verified that I am listed
o URL to find my listing
o Obligations involved with this listing (ie: must link back to the
other site....)
o Room for several notes with follow up comments and dates. This
allows me to keep track of where I am with each submission.
KEYWORDS & META TAGS

KEYWORDS -- Ok, now you have your list of keywords and
keyphrases ready. The next step is to place them.
o Use the most important words in your <TITLE> tag. Don't clutter
it up with them, but have at least a few in there. Make sure it
still looks more like a description than a word list. Using lowercase seems to have a slight advantage over using UPPER-CASE,
because most searches are done using lower-case.
o Use the most important words/phrases in your META description
tag. The same rules apply as with the <TITLE> tag, however,
the META description tag can be somewhat.
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o Use all of your words and phrases in your META keywords tag,
but keep the total size around 200 characters. You're probably
going to have to ditch some of the less important words. Make
sure you don't repeat any word over 4 times. Don't use words
that do not appear in your actual text.
o Use the most important words and/or phrases in your heading
tag (it's the <H1> thing). Same rules apply as with the <TITLE>
tag.
o Use all of the words and phrases you have chosen in your body
text. Using them a few times in the top part of the page is
important, since most search engines place more weight to
words found on the top of the page compared to words found on
the bottom of the page. Remember to make your writing seem
natural when placing keywords, don't just make one big list of
important words.
o Having a link or two containing your keyword in the link text
might also help your ranking. If possible, point the link at a
popular and well known page that is relevant to your keyword.

META TAGS –Meta tags should be placed between the <HEAD> and
</HEAD> tags. Here’s the complete set of meta tags:
<HEAD>
<META name=”title” content=”Web Page Title”>
<META name=”description” content=”Page Description”>
<META name=”keywords” content=”Page Keywords”>
<META name=”author” content=”Page Author”>
<META name=”rating” content=”General”>
<META name=”revisit after” content=”30 days”>
TITLE: Use this section to give a title to your web page. You may
already have a <TITLE> tag, but it won’t hurt to list it again in a
<META> tag.
DESCRIPTION: Use this section to embed a description for your web
page. Remember that web users will read it to decide if they want to
visit your site.
KEYWORDS: Insert the keywords and add synonyms.
AUTHOR: This tag is not commonly used.
RATING: This section allows you to insert ratings such as “General,”
“Fun for Kids” or “For Adults Only” to announce the content of your
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site to search engines.

GOOGLE KEYWORDS -- The Google search engine offers you the
opportunity to get a glimpse into the number of searches performed
each day, week and month. Knowing how popular different keywords
and phrases are is a key ingredient behind tuning your web site to
attract the most traffic.
The system is set up to help people design a text ad to be shown to
the right of search results on the Google site. The rates run from $10
to $15 CPM.
However, they invite you to use the estimating system to determine
how many times your ad will be seen, and the estimates are based on
the historical database of past searches. This is where you can do
some serious keyword tweaking.
Visit the system and design an ad on the first page. Then start
entering the keywords and key phrases that are of interest to you. Tell
the system to estimate your cost for those keywords and it will show
you how many searches are typically made each day, week and month
for your keywords.
You can keep looking at different keywords until you are happy with
your ad. You can then place your ad or not. You might find that you've
been fighting to the death over keywords that nobody ever searches
for.

HOTBOT & NBCi KEYWORDS -- Start by opening your browser to
this URL:
< http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g107hotbot >
You should now have the results of a HotBot search for "free web site
templates."
Now take a look at the terms below the red link for "REFINE YOUR
SEARCH" You'll see:
REFINE YOUR SEARCH
FREE Web Page Templates Free Web Site Free Templates
Free Site Web Site Templates Template Web Free Web Templates
These are called "clues" and they let you know what HotBot thinks are
the most important additional keywords to help a searcher find
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answers if they are not found in the search for "free web site
templates" If HotBot thinks they are important, so should you.
Research those words and target them for optimization.
Read the keywords from left to right, top to bottom. Start with the first
word on the first line and move across to the last word on the right of
the first line before going to the second line. This tells you the mostto-least important of the keywords.
Now click on the suggestion for "Template Web" on the second line.
This takes you to a search for "Template Web" which contains another
set of suggestions for refining a search.
You'll notice a suggestion for "HTML Templates" which was not on the
first suggestion list. Follow the threads of HotBot's suggestions for a
while and you will have developed a substantial list of important and
productive keywords.
If you ask nicely, NBCi will bare its soul to you and help you target
only the best keywords. The "best" keywords are the ones that get
searched for a lot every day.
Start by clicking on the following link to run a search on NBCi:
< http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g108nbci >
You now are looking at the results of a search on NBCi for "free web
templates" Now take a look in the dark gray area just below the
search input field, which contains the words "free web templates"
which is the search we just ran. You're looking for the list of small
sized links titled "Related Searches:" These are the keywords NBCi
considers the most relevant to our search for "free web templates" You
read the suggestions from left to right, first row first then on to the
seconds row left to right and so on. You can discover the sequence of
importance on any engine we discuss by "click and holding" while
dragging your cursor across the related keywords. The highlight will
either go across the page and then down, or it will go down and then
across. Whichever words get highlighted as you drag tells you the
sequence of importance.
Back to our "Related Searches:" you'll notice that each is a link to the
search on NBCi for that phrase or word. Click on each to discover more
"Related Searches:" in each of these links to searches. Notice that at
the end of the "Related Searches:" list is a link to "more..." which is
the obvious place to find more important words and phrases. To find
even more keywords and phrases, use the Keyword Research Tools at
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JimTools. They have just been upgraded and will help you find
keywords that the top sites actually target in their Meta Tags and
keyword density on their pages. The program performs a search on
the engine you select and then fetches the actual pages referenced in
the top 10 search results and analyzes their page code. It doesn't
defeat pages that are cloaked, but that only represents a small
percentage of the Web's pages. This JimTool lets you select any of the
following engines to use for your research:
o Google
o Go/Infoseek
o LookSmart
o Magellan
o WebCrawler
While you are there, try out the "Analyze Keywords" tool, which lets you
analyze the keyword density of any page on the web, including your own.
Other JimWorld keyword research resources:
o Keyword Wizard
A searchable database of the top 5,000 search phrases
harvested from real searches at real search engines and
directories:
< http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g108keyw >
o ToolsForThe.Net
A directory of Webmaster related sites, including an extensive
list of other places to help you pick good keywords.
< http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g108tools >
o JimWorld Freeware
A selection of free software created for JimWorld visitors. The
"Word Market" program will allow you to harvest search phrases
in real time from several search engines and create your own list
of top words and phrases. Grab a copy of the Visibility Analyzer
while you are there. It helps you track you site's performance in
ranking on several search engines.
< http://jimworld.com/go/to.cgi?l=g108free >
SEARCH ENGINES

DMOZ (http://www.dmoz.org/), also known as the Open Directory
Project, is one of the three most important website directories on the
Internet (the others being Yahoo and Looksmart). Unlike search
engines, these directories have editors who pick the sites that are
accepted to them.

YAHOO Business Express -- We all probably understand what 'free
submit' means, but what exactly is this Business Express thing? It is a
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way to make sure that the Yahoo editors review your site within a
week of your submission. It does NOT guarantee that your site will be
added. The "Business Express" option is only available to companies
located in the US, Canada, Australia, UK, New Zealand or Ireland. It
can be used to submit to any category within Yahoo and costs $199
($600 for sites with adult content). This fee includes one free appeal
within 30 days, meaning that if you get rejected, you can try to fix the
problems pointed out by Yahoo and try again without paying any
additional fees.

REGISTER -- In order for people to find your site, you will need to
register with all of the major search engines, and if you have the time,
with the lesser known engines. I recommend and prefer to do the
major search engines manually by visiting them and adding your URL's
from their menu.
Usually, it is a good idea to submit every one of your pages
individually to each search engine (five per day per engine is a good
rule of thumb, unless your site is very big), because most engines
don't add all of your pages unless you submit them individually. At
least Google is an exception to this rule; they can normally grab your
entire site even if you just submit your front page. You should usually
submit only your front page to directories, so if you're going to use
SelfPromotion or a similar tool in submitting your site to search
engines and directories, be careful.

THINGS THAT HURT YOUR RANKING -- There are plenty of things
that can help your site to rank higher in search engines, but there are
also plenty of things that will hurt your ranking or even prevent it from
showing up at all!
There are some common tricks that are supposed to make your site
rank higher, when actually they will hurt your ranking or get your site
banned from the search engine. First there is the "invisible text"
technique. It's pretty simple: Add some text that is in the same color
as the page background to your page. Include keywords to this text the search engine sees it because search engines don't "see" colors,
but your visitors will never know it's there. Your site will rank higher
because you have more keywords in your page. Right? Wrong! Nearly
all the search engines can tell if you're using this technique and will
remove your page from their index or lower your ranking as a
punishment. Never use this technique.
A similar trick is to add extremely small text to your page (sometimes
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the small text and invisible text techniques are used together). Try to
avoid doing this. While some sites need to have small text because of
their design, some search engines may consider large amounts of
small text containing keywords as spamming and hurt your
ranking/drop you from their index.
Whatever you do, don't start including keywords that aren't related to
your site in your META keywords tag or intentionally repeating them in
your body text. For example, if you have a site that's about hamsters,
adding "porn" or "MP3" to your keywords and in your body text might
get you a few extra visitors (provided that your description tag doesn't
reveal that your site is actually something they aren't looking for), but
guess what? The visitors you'll get by using this trick will not be
interested in your site, because they were looking for something else.
They'll just leave immediately - and that kind of visitors are worth
zero, nothing, nada. You'll just be making people angry, so only use
keywords that are actually related to your site.
META refresh tags that are used to automatically redirect a user from
one website to another can be considered as spam by some search
engines. This is because META refresh tags are commonly used with
doorway pages, and some search engines dislike them. Instead of
META refresh tags, just link the page to your main site and tell the
user to click on the link.
Finally, be careful in how many times you use the same keywords in
your text or META tags. If you use one word too often, the search
engine will consider it as spamming and remove your page from the
index. So don't repeat the word "hamburger" in your META keywords
tag too many times even if you have a site that has hamburger
recipes.

MAJOR SEARCH ENGINES – the top ten are:
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
o
www.altavista.com
aol.com
excite.com
www.alltheweb.com (fast search)
goto.com
go.com (infoseek, now disney)
hotbot.com
lycos.com
northernlight.com
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o supersnooper.com
Also check out www.searchenginewatch.com for new search engines
and statistics.

TOP SEARCH ENGINES -- Let's take a peek at what's behind those
numbers and names:
o YH: Yahoo (learn more about Yahoo). As you can see, it's the
leader by far. Yahoo can be searched in two different ways. The
first is to browse their directory; the second is to use their
search function. The search will first go through the directory
and if it finds any matches, it displays them at the top of the list.
Relevant categories are shown first, with relevant sites coming
after them. If it doesn't find any matches or has already shown
you all the matches from the directory, it will use results from
the Google database.
o LY: Lycos. They have acquired the HotBot engine but haven't
completely combined it with their own. HotBot has the Open
Directory Project-directory (learn more about ODP) on their front
page. It is slightly modified from the original version by adding
three related results from GoTo under "Featured Listings" at the
top of each category. For example, the "Games" section of the
directory displays the three top ranking sites from GoTo for the
keyword "Games".
In its search results, HB first displays up to three results from
GoTo, if these are available. They are followed by up to three
results from the Lycos Network, which consist of different parts
of the Lycos site. Next come the 10 best matching Direct Hit
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results, if they are available. If there are less than 10 Direct Hit
results available, HotBot displays a link that says "Get the Top
<number of available Direct Hit results> sites for 'keyword'"
instead. The ranking of the Direct Hit results is determined by
counting the clickthroughs done by the searchers. The logic is
that people will visit mainly sites that are relevant to what they
are searching, thus a site with a large amount of clickthroughs
for a particular keyword should be relevant to that word.
Between the 9th and 10th result one "Featured Site" is listed. It
comes from GoTo like the "Featured Listings" at the directory.
After those results have been shown, HB gives a maximum of
five related ODP categories at the bottom of the page and
proceeds to give out 10 results from the ODP site database. The
rest comes from Inktomi (you can submit to Inktomi by
submitting to Anzwers). You can tell sites coming from ODP by
looking at their listing; all ODP sites will have a line starting with
"More like this:" followed by the ODP category they are listed in.
Sites coming from Inktomi or Direct Hit will have a "See results
from this site only"-line. The sites coming from ODP will use
their ODP description and Title, while the sites coming from
Inktomi will naturally have their title and description taken from
the page itself.
The actual Lycos engine also carries some parts of the ODP
directory at the bottom of its front page. When searched, Lycos
first gives three "Featured Listings", which come from GoTo.
Next, they give a few 'popular sites', which consist of relevant
sections of the Lycos site if any are available. If there are
insufficient on-topic results within the Lycos site, the popular
sites are taken from Direct Hit's results. You can distinguish
between these by looking at the line below 'Popular' heading; if
the results are from the Lycos site, it will read "<amount> of the
Web sites reviewed by Lycos Editors match your search", and if
they are from Direct Hit, the line will read "<amount> Web sites
were selected based on user selection traffic". Lycos then
proceeds by displaying up to four relevant ODP categories and
uses FAST for the rest of the results.
o NB: NBCi (former Snap) The upper part of their front page
contains their very own directory for users to browse. If NBCi is
searched, it begins by giving out a few sponsored listings under
"Search Marketplace", if any are available. They then give out
relevant sites from the NBCi Directory and show up to eight
matching categories at the bottom of the page. When the NBCi
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o
o
o
o
o
Directory runs out of matches, the NBCi LiveDirectory is used. If
the LiveDirectory runs out of matches, Inktomi is used for the
rest of the results.
EX: Excite. When searched, Excite gives out matching sites from
both its own database and the Looksmart directory. The sites
coming from Looksmart use their 'normal' description and title
instead of their Looksmart title & description. Excite also carries
the Looksmart directory on its front page.
AV: Altavista. Like many others, AV has a directory provided by
Looksmart on its front page. When Altavista is searched, it
displays related Looksmart categories (up to six), if any are
found, at the top of the page under a "See reviewed sites in:".
Altavista then continues by giving out sites from its own
database.
AS: Ask Jeeves. This engine is designed to answer questions
asked by the user instead of just searching matches in their
database for words or phrases. Human editors review all
submissions, so unlike most search engines AS does not accept
nearly every site. The Open Directory is displayed at the Ask
Jeeves front page. When Ask Jeeves is searched, it first shows
any specific answers it might have in its database. It then shows
a maximum of five matching sites provided by Direct Hit (the
user may click a link to see more). After that, they perform a
search in About.com's Sprinks, StreamSearch, Mamma and GoTo
for the question asked and allow the user to visit any of the top
ten matching sites in each of these engines if he so desires.
AB: About.com. When searched, it begins by displaying a
maximum of 10 relevant pages in the About.com site. It then
continues by showing up to ten PPC (pay per click) results from
their PPC program called Sprinks, provided that someone has bid
for that keyword. The program is very similar to what GoTo has
been offering for a long time. You can spot a Sprinks listing by
looking at the end of the site's description. If it ends with "Listing
fee <amount>", the site is from Sprinks. The rest of the results
come from Inktomi. The AB site itself is divided into categories
and each category has it's own editor. You can submit to it by Emailing the editor of a category related to your site, but most
editors are very picky and only the best sites get in.
GO: Go.com. This Disney-owned portal has swallowed up
Infoseek, but seems to have lost some of its visitors and is now
claimed to be focusing more on entertainment than typical portal
features. In their search results, they give related categories
from their directory first, then continue by giving out five related
sites from their directory and five related sites from their
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Infoseek search engine database. The user may then select to
either view more site results from the directory or Infoseek,
provided that any are available. Although they use their
directory in searches, it is not displayed on their front page.
o LS: Looksmart. They have their own directory that can be
browsed from their front page and also provides content for
MSN, AV, Excite and many others. Submitting to the directory
costs $199 (Express) or $79 (Basic) for commercial sites. There
is a free submission, but it is reserved only for non-profit
organizations. When Looksmart is searched, it first gives out up
to five related categories found in the directory, then continues
by giving out related sites (also from the directory) and uses
Inktomi for the rest of the results.
o GT: GoTo. The biggest (and best according to many people) of
the pay-per-click engines, its gives out relevant sites in it's
database in the order of "who pays most, gets the first place"
when searched. If it runs out of matches in it's own database, it
draws sites from Inktomi. GoTo also has a directory including
only paying sites on its front page.
o GG: Google. This former small-time engine has been rising in
importance, and after capturing the position of Yahoo's
secondary results provider from Inktomi, it can be seen as one
of the big ones. When Google is searched, it first gives out a
sponsored link, if one is available for the keyword in question.
The sponsored listings can be distinguished from the rest by a
different-colored background and a small "Sponsored Link" text
at the right side of the screen. After that, Google gives a
maximum of two related categories from the Google directory,
which uses ODP data. The rest of the results come from Google's
own database.

NON-INDEPENDENT ENGINES -- As you can see from the chart,
non-independent engines get massive traffic too. But remember that
searching is usually not the primary feature of these sites. An
independent engine probably gets searched more than a non-
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independent one even if the number of visitors is the same.
o AO: AOL. A big ISP and a big site according to the numbers.
When it is searched, it begins by showing a few 'Recommended
sites', if they are available. These consist of AOL's own sites and
paid advertisements. AOL then continues by giving out three
'Sponsored links', which come from GoTo. After those, it gives
out matching sites from the ODP directory, but ranks them
differently than the ODP itself. It seems that AOL spiders and
indexes ODP sites, unlike ODP, which uses only the title, URL
and description provided to it. This means that if your ODP
description/title/URL doesn't contain the word "promotion", you
won't be found on ODP when that word is searched. But if one or
more of your site's pages contain that word, AOL will see you as
relevant even when ODP doesn't! Up to five relevant ODP
categories are also shown at the bottom of the results page. If
the ODP site results get exhausted (they rarely will, unless the
keyword used is rare), it shows relevant sites found in the
Inktomi database.
o MS: MSN. Bill's portal has become one of the biggest players in
the search engine industry. Their search function will first give
out a few "featured sites", if any are available for the keyword
searched. These are mostly paid advertisements and Microsoft's
own sites. After that, it will browse through Looksmart's
directory, showing any relevant sites in the directory. When
every match found there is shown, it will use the Inktomi
database.
Note that if the keyword searched is of adult nature, there is a
small exception to what is described above. Before showing any
results, the user is asked if he/she wishes to use a certain adult
search engine or to see normal MSN results like explained above.
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This naturally means that people who run adult sites will see less
hits from MSN, as some users will decide to use the other engine
instead.
AN: Angelfire. This well-known free webspace provider's front
page features two search boxes. The upper can only be used to
'search Angelfire'. Using this search will first give you five related
sites hosted at Angelfire, then five sites hosted at Tripod. You
may then select to view either more listings from Angelfire or
more listings from Tripod. The lower box can be used to search
the web by HotBot, Lycos, for MP3's (uses the Lycos Music
search), for pics/sound/video (uses the Lycos Multimedia search)
or FTP servers (uses the Lycos FAST FTP search).
NS: Netscape. When searched in the default mode, Netscape
uses "Netscape Search". It first gives out two results from GoTo
under "Partner Search results". If the keyword you entered is the
name of a major company (ie. Netscape), the official site of this
company will then be shown under "Official Web Sites". The
search then gives up to ten relevant results from within the
Netscape site and goes on to give 10 related ODP categories.
After those it shows relevant sites from the ODP directory. If no
matching ODP sites are found, it uses Google, but it does not
show Google results if there is even one matching ODP site.
Netscape can also be told to search from Excite, Ask Jeeves,
Google, GoTo, HotBot, Looksmart, Altavista or Lycos databases.
However, I believe that an overwhelming majority at least
begins their search by using the "Netscape Search".
TR: Tripod. A large free webspace provider, it has a search box
that the user may use to search Tripod, Lycos, HotBot, MP3's,
FTP servers and for audio/video. The search options work
identically to the ones at Angelfire, except that the order of sites
in Tripod search is reversed (Tripod sites come first, followed by
Angelfire sites).
IW: Iwon. First, Iwon displays links to all sections on its site that
match the query. It then gives out a maximum of five relevant
categories found in Looksmart, and uses Inktomi for the rest.
The user also has the option to select a related 'popular search'
powered by Direct Hit from the right side of the screen.
CN: CNet. Users may select to search either CNet (default) or
The Web, which uses Search.com, a metasearchengine that gets
its results from many other engines. When searched,
Search.com begins by showing up to three (user may click on a
link to see more) GoTo results under the heading "Search
Partners". The engine then continues by showing results in
mixed order from other engines including but not limited to
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Altavista, Direct Hit, Findwhat, NBCi, Open Directory, Yahoo and
Lycos.
RL: Real. Their small search box is located at the bottom of the
front page, thus I believe that it is only used by a small
percentage of visitors. Users may search either the Real site or
the NBCi database (default). When the NBCi database is
searched through Real, it uses a special "RealPlayer mode",
which gives sites that support RealPlayer according to the NBCi
Directory & LiveDirectory at the top. Sites that do not support
RealPlayer are ranked very low.
ZD: ZDnet. Users may search either ZDnet (default) or "The
Web". The latter option uses CNet's Search.com metasearch
engine.
IS: Infospace. IS carries the Looksmart directory on its front
page and also has a search feature. In the default mode (Web
Search) Infospace uses the Dogpile metasearch engine, which
draws its results from several big search engines. The search
feature can be changed to use GoTo, Looksmart or Open
Directory, if the user so chooses.
IC: ICQ. They have two search boxes on their front page. The
one located at the top of the page searches the ICQ site for
matches. The other, buried at the bottom of the page, starts by
delivering related categories from the ODP, then gives out
matching sites from ODP. It seems to use a similar method in
ranking ODP results as AOL, although ODP titles and descriptions
seem to get a lot of weight in the algorithm. After all ODP
matches are shown, the user may click on a link to see
additional results from Inktomi.
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