Behold my science project! This project was done on the web and the search engines on the web. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the power, speed, and efficiency of selected search engines and also to provide information on how to increase the popularity of a web page.
The materials needed to complete the experiments are:
The methods followed to complete the experiments are:
To do this experiment two web pages must first be created (the two pages used in the experiment were Senseless1 and Senseless2 ). Pages can be created with any web publisher or tutorial. (the experiment was done using Netscape Wizard and AOL My Place). The pages are written in HTML and two very important tags must be added. The META name tags are put into one of the two pages created. This is one of the variables. Once the pages are created and the META name tags added to a page, a web space must be acquired for both pages. Web space can be acquired with many different publishers. Once the space is acquired then the HTML page must be transferred to the space. When the pages are transferred they are ready to be submitted and indexed in several search engines. To submit pages to search engines, a submitting site may be used or the pages can be directly submitted into a search engine at the engine's home page. Once this is all done, the experiments can begin. Experiment on the different search engines that the pages have been submitted to by searching for keywords that have been put as keywords in the META tags of the pages and see which page is pulled up the closest to the top and where in the ranking it is listed. Repeat these experiments with all the search engines and with the different keywords. Once the experimental data is received, it must be analyzed and presented in graphs, the conclusion, statistics, ect. This will complete the project's experiments.
In result to the experiments performed, it was found that meta tags vary in effect on relevancy ranking. Certain search engines such as AltaVista ranked the page with meta tags higher than the page without on a search for sense question. However, on all the searches for senseless, Senseless1, the page without meta tags, was listed higher at 30th than Senseless2, the page without the meta tags, which was never found. In a search for sense HotBot ranked Senseless1 at 77th with a 99% ranking and Senseless2 at 98th with a 95% ranking. AltaVista had the same effect on this search, listing Senseless1 at 147th and Senseless2 at 149th. The meta tags did not boost the relevancy ranking on HotBot or Lycos in the search for sense question. HotBot never brought up either page after numerous results being scanned. This was also the same with Lycos.
Also found out in these experiments was the fact that direct submission takes a relatively long time to complete. It took the submission of Senseless Questions anywhere form five days to five weeks. Some engines didn't index the pages at all. Out of the seven engines that the pages were submitted to, only three of the engines indexed them within a months time. Magellan, WebCrawler, Excite, and Yahoo! were the four engines which did not index the page in the allotted span of time of about seven weeks. AltaVista, HotBot, and Lycos were the only engines which submitted the pages in the given time as noted above.
Other data collected included the time it took the search engines to process and display its search results. HotBot took 64.75 seconds to display its results and AltaVista took 45.25 seconds to display its query results. WebCrawler took 34.5 9 seconds for its searches and Lycos had a speed of 32.75 seconds per search. Excite was in the middle of the pack with an average search time of 31.75 seconds. Magellan came in second fastest with a speedy 25.25 seconds for its searches. But the fastest display was by the ever popular Yahoo! with its amazing 20.25 second searches.
In application to these results it is concluded that Meta tags are worth the time. Although not all search engines support the tags, there are some that do and the tags will help traffic through a site. The tags are simple to put up and overall it comes out worth it. It is also concluded that a site should be submitted to several search engines as soon as possible.
Through the experiments of timed searches, accuracy, and submission speed, it is concluded that AltaVista is the best search engine to use. It was the fastest to index the pages (about a week), has probably one of the largest indexes, and was very accurate in all searches (Senseless1 and Senseless2 were ranked at the top of the returned list on a search for senseless questions. For the search on senseless, Senseless 1 was ranked 147th and Senseless2 at 149th. AltaVista was especially accurate in the search for sense question, in which Senseless2 was listed at number 30 unlike any results from other engines).
In order to further get more accurate results, more testing would need to be done. Changing the wording of the meta description tag may have a difference in the searches. More time data should be taken from various times of the day. In order to test more search engines, a longer amount of time would be needed so that all the engines could index the page.It might also be useful to search for more keywords.
If you have comments or suggestions, email me at AVSFREAK@AOL.COM
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