Exercise 23: Searching mechanisms

1. What is a spider? What does it do?

Schneider (2006) stated that spider is a part of the search engine. It is used to search the webpage and website which interesting to people automatically.
Awad (2004) defined that "spider: a software tool that prowls the internet looking for new sites where information is likely to reside."

During the search, the spider will collect information from the page such as the links contained on the page, keywords, title, content and also "meta" tag for user to search in the future.

2. What is a meta-search engine? Provide some examples.
meta is the keywords that describe the webpages but not part of the web content. (Schneider)
Rosen (2002) pointed that the meta-search engine looks for the meta tag in the webpages only. It then locates the website to the user by keyword matching.

Examples of meta-search engine:
Clusty
Dogpile

3. How can you get your site listed at major search sites; and how could you improve your site ranking?

a. Register a suitable domain name for the website.
b. Register the website to the major search engine.
c. Put the website into subitable category.
d. Use suitable meta in the website for spider to locate.
e. Better design and content of web to make it a popular search.
e. Paid or sponsor to the company of search engine to increase its rank.
f. Advertise on the search engine.


Reference:
Schneider, G. P. (2006), Electronic Commerce Sixth Annual Edition, Thomson, Canada, p. 203-205

Awad, E. M. (2004), Electronic Commerce (2nd ed), Pearson Education, NJ, p. 44

Rosen A. (2002), The e-commerce question and answer book: a survival guide for business managers (2nd ed), American Management Association, NY, p. 182

Meta-Search Engines, Retrieved 16 May 2009 from http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/MetaSearch.html

Ince, D. (2004), Developing Distributed and E-commerce Applications (2nd ed.), Pearson, p. 438-439