Gary Eckstein

Search Engines are responsible for directing Internet users to billions of websites every day. One of the key factors for Google, Bing, Ask and Yahoo in directing Internet users is knowing what is available on the many Internet pages. The Search Engines therefore want to know when content has been added or amended on Internet Pages.

Most Webmasters or Blog owners have a vested interest in Search Engines sending visitors to their website. Traffic from Search Engines can mean success or failure for most websites or Blogs. It is therefore beneficial for Webmasters and Blog owners to assist Search Engines by advising when there is new or changed content on a Site or Blog. A simple and effective means of advising of amended content is ‘pinging’ the Search Engines.

If you are using a Content Management System (such as WordPress) you’ll likely be able to ping Search Engines from the Content Management System itself (or from a ‘plugin’). If you require pinging the most popular Search Engines manually then just follow this very simple tutorial.

1. Ensure you have an up to date Sitemap.XML file in the root directory of your HTML server domain (there are a number of free online sitemap creation tools).
2. Enter the following into the URL address bar of your Internet Browser for each of the following: -   Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=FULL_URL_TO_YOUR_SITEMAP -  Ask: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap= FULL_URL_TO_YOUR_SITEMAP -  Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=YOUR_URL - Bing:  http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap= YOUR_URL

Notes:

• FULL_URL_TO_YOUR_SITEMAP: Enter the full URL to the Sitemap>XML file e.g. http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
• YOUR_URL: Enter the URL of your Domain e.g. http://www.example.com.
• Warning: Make sure that you are not blocking the Search Engine from searching your site. Use a valid robots.txt file.

And that is how simple it is to let the Big 4 Search Engines know that you have updated content (and add to the Search Engine Optimization of your Site)! The Search Engines benefit from a Ping by knowing that there is new content to index on your Website or Blog. You benefit through Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask having up to date information which to supply to Internet users (and hopefully direct those users to your Website).

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Most people use a single search engine for a high proportion of their searches. People occasionally use other search engines when they are unable to find appropriate results using their primary search engine. The most popular search engines are Google, Live and Yahoo. This article recommends that people divorce from interchanging between these search engines and employ a search strategy of using Clusty in addition to one of these search engines.

The trio of Google, Live and Yahoo all present their results in an ordered list. Each prioritises and returns results based on mathematical algorithms. The results returned from these very popular search engines look very similar even although the content and order of the results differ. As an example, I searched each of the three search engines for my name; Gary Eckstein. Google returned 346,000 results, Yahoo 1,220,000 results and Live 278,000 results. The first page of results returned was different for each search engine. I am a huge fan of Google and think that their search results are superior to both Yahoo and Live. The problem however still arises that a few hundred thousand results have been returned and Google is guessing which ones I’ll find most relevant by displaying them in an ordered but very long list. This is where Clusty comes ‘into its own’.

Clusty is a search engine with a difference; Clusty returns search results in ‘clusters’ (categories). Once the search term is entered and submitted, Clusty searches Gigablast, Live, the Open Directory, Ask and other search engines and returns the results. In addition, the results are clustered (categorised) to the left of the screen (see the image to the right for an example). When one clicks on one of the Clusters, the results relating to that cluster alone are returned. This Clustering is incredibly powerful in narrowing the few hundred thousand results retuned. As an example I was recently searching for ITIL Availability Management process documentation. Searching in Google, Live and Yahoo returned millions of pages and I could not locate actual process documentation after an hour of searching. Searching on Clusty with the same terms and narrowing the results by Cluster gave me the required results in less than a minute.

As mentioned before, I am a huge fan of Google especially when searching for things like movie showing times. Google falls short when there are millions of Internet pages with very similar terms in them and this is where Clusty becomes very valuable. It takes a bit of time to understand where the strengths and weaknesses of Clusty, Google and the other search engines live but I strongly recommend trying out Clusty in addition to using your usual favourite search engine.

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