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Internet Marketing Glossary

TYPES OF SEARCHES - There are various types of search available through search engines. The most common is a "keyword" search but you should be aware of others.

Boolean search - A search allowing the inclusion or exclusion of documents containing certain words through the use of operators such as AND, NOT and OR.

Concept search - A search for documents related conceptually to a word, rather than specifically containing the word itself.

Full-text index - An index containing every word of every document cataloged, including stop words (defined below). A search that will find matches even when words are only partially spelled or misspelled.

Keyword search - A search for documents containing one or more words that are specified by a user. The most common search!

Phrase search - A search for documents containing a exact sentence or phrase specified by a user.

Query-By-Example - A search where a user instructs an engine to find more documents that are similar to a particular document. Also called "find similar."

HTML (also known as "Hypertext Markup Language")
- A standardized language of computer code, imbedded in "source" documents behind all Web documents, containing the textual content, images, links to other documents (and possibly other applications such as sound or motion), and formatting instructions for display on the screen. When you view a Web page, you are looking at the product of this code working behind the scenes in conjunction with your browser.

Browsers are programmed to interpret HTML for display. HTML often imbeds within it other programming languages and applications such as SGML, XML, Javascript, CGI-script and more. It is possible to deliver or access and execute virtually any program via the WWW. HINT: You can see HTML by selecting the View pop-down menu tab, then "Page Source", "View Source", etc in your web browser.

Index - The searchable catalog of documents created by search engine software. Also called "catalog." Index is often used as a synonym for search engine. Index is commonly pluralized as "indices." However, Search Engine Watch instead uses the alternative plural form "indexes."

Pagerank™ - Pagerank was developed by the developers of Google and is a trademark of this search engine. PageRank relies on the "uniquely democratic nature" of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than just the sheer volume of links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the "vote". Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance. Google notes that its complex technology and algorithms prevent "human tampering" that might compromise the integrity of Google's search results.

Pagerank operates on a scale of "0" to "10". "0" means the page isn't ranked by Google or the page has been banned by the search engine. A Pagerank of 5 is considered respectable. Any page with a "PR" of 6 or above is deemed as a very strong. Sites that have a PR of 10 are usually large and very well known website e.g. as of May 5, 3007 ibm.com's PR = 9; adobe.com's and microsoft.com's PR = 10.

NOTE: Pagerank is just ONE factor that determines a page's search engine rankings and "strength" as determined by Google.

Precision - The degree in which a search engine lists documents matching a query. The more matching documents that are listed, the higher the precision. For example, if a search engine lists 80 documents found to match a query but only 20 of them contain the search words, then the precision would be 25%.

Recall - Related to precision, this is the degree in which a search engine returns all the matching documents in a collection. There may be 100 matching
documents, but a search engine may only find 80 of them. It would then list these 80 and have a recall of 80%.

Relevancy - How well a document provides the information a user is looking for, as measured by the user.

Search Engine - The software that searches an index and returns matches. Search engine is often used synonymously with spider and index, although these are separate components that work with the engine. The four "major" search as of 2007 are Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN.

Spider - The software that scans documents and adds them to an index by following links. Spider is often used as a synonym for search engine. Spiders are also sometimes referred to a "crawlers", "robots" or "bots".

Stemming - The ability for a search to include the "stem" of words. For example, stemming allows a user to enter "swimming" and get back results also for the stem word "swim."

Stop words - Conjunctions, prepositions and articles and other words such as AND, TO and A that appear often in documents yet alone may contain little
meaning.

Thesaurus - A list of synonyms a search engine can use to find matches for particular words if the words themselves don't appear in documents.

Title (of a document) - The official title of a document from the "meta" field called title. The text of this meta title field may or may not also occur in the visible body of the document. It is what appears in the top bar of the window when you display the document and it is the title that appears in search engine results. The "meta" field called title is not mandatory in HTML coding. Sometimes you retrieve a document with "No Title" as its supposed title; this is caused when the meta-title field is left blank.

URL (also known as "Uniform Resource Locator") - The unique address of any Web document. May be keyed in a browser's OPEN or LOCATION / GO TO box to retrieve a document. There is a logic the layout of a URL:

Anatomy of a URL:

• Type of file (could say ftp:// or telnet://) -> http://
• Domain name (computer file is on and its location on the Internet) -> www.customfitonline.com/
• Path or directory on the computer to this file -> news/
• Name of file, and its file extension (usually ending in .html or .htm) -> internet-marketing-001.htm

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