The
information below should help to answer some of the most
commonly asked questions about website design and the
service we provide.
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Search Engine Questions
Q - What's
an Internet search engine?
Q - How
does a search engine know about the millions of documents on the
Internet?
Q - What's
an Internet subject directory?
Q - What's
better - a search engine or a subject directory?
Q - My
site's new to the web, and it was recently submitted to Google but
is not showing up?
Q - My
site's been live for a few months but has not appeared on the Google
index.
Q - On
Google some of my pages are included, but others are missing.
Your
Website
Q - Cannot
view changes made to your site.
Search Engine Questions
Q -
What's an Internet search
engine?
One way of finding
information on the Internet is to use a "search engine". This is an
Internet tool which will search for Internet sites containing the
words that you designate as a search term. It provides results back
to you in the form of links to those sites which have the term(s)
you're looking for.
For example, if you
wanted to see if there were any math lesson plans on the Internet
that you could borrow, you might enter "math and lessons and plans"
as your search term. After a brief wait, you would receive a web
page with dozens of links to sites which had those particular words
somewhere in the site.
It's important to
understand that search engines DO NOT search the Internet itself.
They DO search databases of information ABOUT the Internet which the
company hosting the search engine has developed. Each search engine
looks through a different database and that's why they each will
reach different results from exactly the same terms. The degree of
detail recorded by search engines varies greatly. For instance, some
may enter the entire text of the document into a searchable field
and others may only enter a short description. This is only one way
in which search engines differ. Another difference is in the level
of sophistication employed by the search engine when it looks
through its database.
Q-
How does a search engine know about the millions of documents on the
Internet?
Search engines do not
search the Internet itself, but instead search a database of
information about the Internet. Thus, when a document is placed on
the Internet, it will only be found by a search engine if
information about that document has been recorded in the search
engine's database.
There are at least
two ways a search engine finds out about a document. One way is for
the publisher of the document to register it with the engine. If a
document publisher wants to ensure that a document is "found" by
search engines, then the publisher will usually register with as
many engines as possible.
The second way that
documents get registered is if the search engine company finds it as
part of its research routines. Some search engines use "spiders" or
search robots to search the Internet and gather information which is
subsequently recorded in the engine's database.
Q -
What's an Internet
subject directory?
Subject directories
organize Internet sites by subject, allowing users to choose a
subject of interest and then browse the list of resources in that
category. Users conduct their searches by selecting a series of
progressively more narrow search terms from a number of lists of
descriptors provided in the directory. In this fashion, users
"tunnel" their way through progressively more specific layers of
descriptors until they reach a list of resources which meet all of
the descriptors they had chosen.
For example, if you
were using the Yahoo subject directory to find math lesson plans,
you would start at the top level of the directory where there are
approximately 15 general categories, including "arts and
humanities", "government" and "education." Selecting "education"
would lead to a list of about 35 descriptors, including "higher
education", "magazines", and "teaching." Selecting "teaching" would
lead to another page of resources all about teaching - including
"English", "K-12", and "Math." This last choice would reveal a
number of actual resources for the math teacher.
It's important to
understand that a subject directory will not have links to every
piece of information on the Internet. Since they are built by humans
(rather than by computer programs), they are much smaller than
search engine databases. Moreover, every directory is different and
their value will depend on how widely the company searches for
information, their method of categorizing the resources, how well
information is kept current, etc.
Q -
What's better - a search engine or a subject directory?
There is no hard
and fast answer to that question. A lot depends on the personal
preferences of the user. Some people like directories because the
user can control the search pattern, varying the path through the
descriptors if another descriptor looks promising. Directories allow
users to browse and to be more vague or general in their search
term. Search engines leave the searching pattern to the computer
program and can be used to find more specific resources.
A weakness of
directories is that you must depend on the descriptors provided by
the company. If these are not specific enough for you, then your
search may be unsuccessful. As a result, directories can be good for
finding general information, but not too successful in locating
specifics. Also, the number of resources that you can find in a
directory is generally far less than through a search engine.
A weakness of the
search engines is the very extensive amount of hits that they can
produce. A general search term could produce thousands of hits - far
too many to be of much value.
Q
-
My site's new to the web, and it was recently submitted to Google
but is not showing up?
Google finds sites
through a process known as "crawling" the web. This involves robot
software that follows hyperlinks from site to site. Google currently
looks at billions of URLs during its crawls.
When a URL is
submitted to Google, they are able to look for it on the next crawl.
If your URL has already been submitted, your site could easily
appear in the search results after the next crawl. However, if no
other sites links to yours, it may be difficult for the crawler to
find you. Conversely, if many sites link to your page, there's a
good chance Google will find you even without the submission of your
URL.
Q -
My site's been live for a few months but has not appeared on the
Google index.
If Google has not
picked up your site after several months, it's possible that the
spiders aren't able to find your pages. If you increase the links
pointing to these pages, it'll improve the chance that they will
find your site.
Q -
On Google some of my pages are included, but others are missing.
Although Google
indexes billions of webpages, they cannot guarantee that they will
crawl all the pages on a particular site. However, they are always
working to increase the number of pages they crawl and hope to
include more pages in their index over time.
If your site's
internal link structure doesn't provide a path to all of your pages,
the Google robot may not see all the pages on your site. Google
follows links from one page to the next, so pages that aren't linked
to by others may be missed.
Your Website
Q -
Cannot view changes
made to your site.
The most common cause
of web pages not updating once you have uploaded new files to your
hosting space is Caching.
Caching is used
widely across the Internet to cut down the amount of time it takes
to request information. It works by keeping a temporary copy of
information that has been requested locally for a defined amount of
time. Here's
a few things to try:
1. Click
"refresh" or "reload" on your browser.
2. Internet
Explorer try the Ctrl + F5 keyboard combination, Netscape users -
SHIFT + F5, FireFox users - Ctrl + R.
AOL - The refresh
button in AOL may not always display the most recent changes to a
web page. Just hold down the CTRL key and click your refresh button
at the same time. This forces the AOL server to grab a fresh copy of
the web page rather than showing you what is cached.
3. If you are
viewing your site using a http://www address, try it just with
http:// to force the browser or ISP to retrieve display the new
page. 4.
Alter your browser settings for caching.
In Internet
Explorer, go to Tools, select Internet Options and then under
Temporary Internet Files, select Settings to adjust how often
Internet Explorer checks for changes to pages.
In Netscape, go to
the Edit menu and choose Preferences, then select the Advanced
tab and then Cache. You can adjust how often your cached files
are checked.
FireFox, Click
Tools and select Options, Click the Privacy Icon, Click Clear
across from the Cache option, Click Ok, Exit and re-launch the
browser.
America Online (AOL), Click Start, select Settings and Control
Panel, Double-click Internet Options to open Internet
Properties, Click Delete Files, Click OK on the Delete Files
dialog box, Click OK.
5. If these
strategies don't work, it could be your ISP (Internet Service
Provider). ISP Caching works in much the same way once you have
visited a website your ISP may cache those pages so that they appear
to load faster the next time you visit them. The main problem with
this is that unlike your Browser cache you can not delete these
temporary files, instead you have to wait until your ISPs cache
expires and it requests fresh copies of the files. This can be very
frustrating if you are trying to develop or make changes to your
website.
Unfortunately there is very little that can be done except to change
your ISP. Most ISPs do not cache pages for more than half an hour or
so but there are some that take considerably longer.
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