Behavioral
A behavioral search engine is a little bit trickier. Behaviorals look for searches by prior history. In other words, these search engines try to guess what exactly you’re looking for based upon your previous search inquiries. If you’re a coffee-drinker, and you’re always searching for some good java, a general search engine might turn up results about coffee beans and the computer programming language. By contrast, if you search using a behavioral engine, over time, it’s going to figure out by your user history that you’re only looking for coffee, and drop out the technology results completely the next time you run a search for [java].
A good example of a behavioral search engine is Collarity (www.collarity.com), which sends you results and advertising based upon your search and browser history. The engines keep track of your history by using cookies, tiny innocuous text files automatically stored on your computer that can be easily referenced by these external programs. You’re basically leaving an electronic breadcrumb trail as you browse, and the behavioral search engine uses it to give you the most relevant results possible.
Discovering Internal Site Search
Say you’re writing an article and you need to reference something in the New York Times. NYTimes.com keeps an archive of online articles, but because you can’t remember the date the article was published, you’d have a long trek through the online archives. Luckily, they have their own internal site search engine that enables you to look up articles using keywords. Any search engine that’s site specific, or searches just that Web site, is an internal site search engine.Larger Web sites with thousands of pages employ these as an easy way of browsing their archives. A very small site probably doesn’t need an internal search, but most e-commerce sites with more than a few products should consider implementing one.
Techniques that help you rank in general search engines also help your users when they need to find something on your site using an internal search. A good internal search can be the difference between making a sale and visitors leaving in frustration. To get started quickly, Google offers a hosted internal search solution as well as an enterprise level solution. See https://www.google.com/cloud/ for more information.
Industry-specific
Industry-specific vertical search engines serve particular types of businesses. The real estate industry has its own search engines like Zillow.com, Roost. com, and Realtor.com that provide housing listings, and companion sites like ServiceMagic.com, which is for home improvement contractors. For the medical industry, there’s WebMD, a search engine devoted entirely to medical questions and services. If you are searching for legal services, Findlaw. com and Lawyers.com can help you search for an attorney by location and practice.
Local
A local search engine is an engine specializing in Web sites that are tied to a limited physical area also known as a geo-targeted area. Basically, it’s looking for things in your general neck of the woods. In addition to their main index, each of the major search engines has a local-only engine that they can integrate into their main results, like Google Local and Yahoo! Local. In submitting a page to a search engine, you have an option of listing up to five different criteria you can be searched under, including address, telephone number, city, and so on. That means if a site is submitted with information stating that it’s a local business, it’ll pop up if someone’s looking for that location and product. If you live in Milwaukee and you’re looking for a chiropractor, you would have to type in [Milwaukee chiropractor] into the search box: If you don’t, you would end up with listings of hundreds of different chiropractors in places that are a little out of your range, like Grand Rapids. Adding a city or a ZIP code to your search automatically narrows the focus.
Understanding Metasearch Engines
Another breed of search engine you should be aware of is a metasearch engine. Metasearch engines do not maintain a database of their own, but instead combine results from multiple search engines. The advantage they tout is a twist on “bigger is better” — the more results you see in one fell swoop, the better. The sites Dogpile.com and Metacrawler.com top the list of metasearch engines. When you run a search on Metacrawler.com, it pulls and displays results from the four largest global engines (Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft Live Search, and Ask.com) in one place
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