A search engine owned by Yahoo. See http://www.alltheweb.com/

One of the earliest search engines – it’s now owned by Yahoo! See http://www.altavista.com/

Ask was formerly known as Ask Jeeves – and was the first commercial search engine to support search queries in plain English as well as traditional keyword searching. See http://uk.ask.com/?o=312&l=dir

Blended search results incorporate many sources into the results pages of a search rather than simply web pages. The results may include: images, videos, maps, products, news and books. Google call this universal search.

See Also: Universal Search

Memory used to store frequently used data which might otherwise take some time to load. Search engines hold cached copies of web pages.

How deeply a site is crawled / indexed – i.e. are all of the pages of the site indexed?

How frequently a site is crawled.

A crawler is an agent sent out by a search engine to catalogue websites for indexing purposes.

See Also: Bot, Robot, Spider

Refers to content on a site which is the same (i.e. duplicate, or near to duplicate) across many pages. This is frowned upon by search engines – who will not index multiple pages which they deem to contain the same content.

When a two word query is entered into Google, but returns only one result. Made famous by British comedian Dave Gorman who authored a book called “Googlewhack Adventure” wherein he travelled the world finding people who had authored them. See http://www.davegorman.com/projects_googlewhack_adventure.html

Search engine powered by MSN. This has now been replaced by Bing.com

Search results which are aggregated from various search engines – an example of which is myriadsearch.com

Refers to algorithms which attempt to understand the users intent (or true meaning) behind the search query which they have entered into the engine.

In SEM terms personalisation refers to the delivery of personalised search engine results based on a users location, previous search behaviour, etc

The phrase which a user enters into a search engine.

See Also: Search Term

A tool which users utilise to find relevant web pages on the internet which pertain to the query which they have entered.

See Also: Google, Index, MSN, Yahoo!

The phrase which a user enters into a search engine.

A search engine founded in 2000, it was acquired by Ask Jeeves in 2001 and powered ask.com and other international Ask Jeeves sites. In 2006 Teoma was re-branded and redirected to ask.com

Blended search results incorporate many sources into the results pages of a search rather than simply web pages. The results may include: images, videos, maps, products, news and books. Google call this universal search.

See Also: Blended Search Results

Whereas traditional search engines crawl and index the whole internet, vertical search engines instead focus on a specific topic. Frequently, companies who cater for this topic elect to advertise on these vertical search sites as although they cannot necessarily deliver the volume that a traditional search engine can, they are able to deliver a very focused audience. Vertical search sites are prevalent in the following industries – property, jobs, corporate purchasing etc

Yahoo! Provides many services including a search engine, the Yahoo! Directory, a Web Portal, Yahoo! Mail, news, and posting. See http://www.yahoo.com