Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business Strategy, Revised and Updated

THE CURRENT STATE OF SEARCH ENGINES

As the Web has evolved, a vast number of search engines have launched. They generally fall into one of the following categories:

• Human-edited directories: These are either constructed entirely by hand (as Yahoo! was originally) or constructed via a Web crawl or site owner submission and categorized and ranked by hand. Examples include the Open Directory Project (dmoz.org), About.com, and, more recently, Mahalo.com.
• Automated search engines: These are built algorithmically via Web crawlers and cataloged and ranked algorithmically as well. Since these types of search engines (such as Google) are the kind used by most searchers today, performing well in these is what this book focuses on.
• Meta search engines (aggregators): These search engines generally use results from other search engines and present them in a different way either by presenting the results from multiple other engines together (such as dogpile.com) or with a different visual look.