Specialty Search Engines: Everything You Need to Know About Them
Specialty Search Engines: Everything You Need to Know About Them
By Arlene Cuares
Typical search engines crawl and index the many, many pages of the Internet - and we are talking about billions, if not trillions, of pages. If you search using one or two search terms like what most web searchers do, you will get quite a number of page results. Most of these results are not the ones you are really looking for. It is not unusual that the search engine will treat your search terms differently than what you intend it to be.
For instance, a simple search for the word flight will give you results as shown below:
- Flight - a journey in an aircraft
- Flight - a sudden movement
- Flight - running or avoiding someone
- Flight - another word for stairs
Searching this way can be time-consuming and getting results like this is a bit frustrating, especially if you don’t know any sophisticated techniques to get a more targeted result for your searches. This is where specialty search engines come in handy. Specialty search engines are more focused on a specific subject or topic thus they will give you more relevant results. In the above example, someone who wants to travel can easily look for flights by using a travel search engine.
Specialty search engines are also known as topical search engines, vertical search engines or vortals. They focus on a specific topic like business, law, or medical research, a geographic location, a target audience, or a specific file format like pdf files. Unlike general search engines, they search from only a few specific sites thus they often offer greater depth of coverage for a category that makes results narrower and more relevant.
Some of them also operate like directories where a human editor who is an expert in the subject reviews submitted sites before they got listed. This will make the results of higher quality and more reliable than what you can get from general search engines.
They can also help find the invisible web. Invisible web refers to the vast repository of information like databases that search engines and directories cannot retrieve. The contents of most of these databases require direct interaction from them. Since spiders cannot think and type the required fields in these databases, information cannot be retrieved. Not everything on the Web is visible because of technical barriers of search engine crawlers and the site owner’s deliberate choice of excluding his web pages from the search engines. The invisible web offers a gold mine of information that you may not want to miss.
Article Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Arlene_Cuares
http://EzineArticles.com/?Specialty-Search-Engines:-Everything-You-Need-to-Know-About-Them&id=1671129
