Section 5.8 Review Questions 1. What is a search engine? Why are they important for today's businesses? A search engine is a software program that searches for documents(Internet sites or files) based on the key words(individual words, multi-word terms, or a complete sentence)that users have provided that have to do with the subject of their inquiry. This is the most prominent type of information retrieval system fo finding relevant content on the Web Search engines have become the centerpiece of most Internet-based transactions and other activities. Because people use them extensively to learn about products and services, it is very important for companies to have prominent visibility on the Web; hence the major effort of companies to enhance their search engine optimization(SEO) 2. what is a web crawler? what is it used for? How does it work? A Web crawler(also called a spider or a Web spider )is a piece of software that systematically browses(crawls through) the World Wide Web for the purpose of find ing and fetching Web pages. It starts with a list of"seed"URLS, goes to the pages of those URLS, and then follows each page's hyperlinks, add ing them to the search engine's database. Thus, the Web crawler navigates through the Web in order to construct the database of websites 3. What is"search engine optimization"? Who benefits from it? Search engine optimization(SEO) is the intentional activity of affecting the visibility of an e-commerce site or a website in a search engines natural (unpaid or organic)search results. It involves editing a pages content, HTML, metadata and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific key words and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. In addition, SEO efforts include promoting a site to increase its number of inbound linkS. SEO primarily benefits companies with e-commerce sites by making their pages appear toward the top of search engine lists when users query 4. What things can help Web pages rank higher in the search engine results? Cross-linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to the most important pages may improve its visibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries, will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give add itional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a Web page's metadata, includ ing the title tag and metadescription, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL normalization of Web pages so that they are accessible via multiple URLS and using canonical link elements and redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count toward the page's link opularity scol Copyright C2018 Pearson Education, Inc.10 Copyright © 2018Pearson Education, Inc. Section 5.8 Review Questions 1. What is a search engine? Why are they important for today’s businesses? A search engine is a software program that searches for documents (Internet sites or files) based on the keywords (individual words, multi-word terms, or a complete sentence) that users have provided that have to do with the subject of their inquiry. This is the most prominent type of information retrieval system for finding relevant content on the Web. Search engines have become the centerpiece of most Internet-based transactions and other activities. Because people use them extensively to learn about products and services, it is very important for companies to have prominent visibility on the Web; hence the major effort of companies to enhance their search engine optimization (SEO). 2. What is a web crawler? What is it used for? How does it work? A Web crawler (also called a spider or a Web spider) is a piece of software that systematically browses (crawls through) the World Wide Web for the purpose of finding and fetching Web pages. It starts with a list of “seed” URLs, goes to the pages of those URLs, and then follows each page’s hyperlinks, adding them to the search engine’s database. Thus, the Web crawler navigates through the Web in order to construct the database of websites. 3. What is “search engine optimization”? Who benefits from it? Search engine optimization (SEO) is the intentional activity of affecting the visibility of an e-commerce site or a website in a search engine’s natural (unpaid or organic) search results. It involves editing a page’s content, HTML, metadata, and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. In addition, SEO efforts include promoting a site to increase its number of inbound links. SEO primarily benefits companies with e-commerce sites by making their pages appear toward the top of search engine lists when users query. 4. What things can help Web pages rank higher in the search engine results? Cross-linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to the most important pages may improve its visibility. Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrases, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries, will tend to increase traffic. Updating content so as to keep search engines crawling back frequently can give additional weight to a site. Adding relevant keywords to a Web page’s metadata, including the title tag and metadescription, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site’s search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL normalization of Web pages so that they are accessible via multiple URLs and using canonical link elements and redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the URL all count toward the page’s link popularity score