Analysis: Domain Names & Searches : A Special Report

Domain names have many uses. As well as providing a recognizable online identity for your organization or company, they can on occasion serve to boost the results of searches on some of the largest search engines. Read on to find out more...

The following question was sent to all the major search engines to gather information on their domain name policies:-

"Does the domain name of a site have any effect on its "relevancy" during a search? If so, how?"

In general, most of the search engines replied that domain names have little or no effect on the relevancy of a search. However, domain names are relevant for two of the largest engines. Here are the replies received from each search engine. [Note that some search engines chose not to reply to this question]

OpenText

I can't speak for other search engines, but on the Open Text Index, there's a greater weight given to the score calculated for searches that find the search word/phrase in the URL, than for finding the word in the page itself.

WebCrawler

Domain names have nothing to do with index relevance at WebCrawler.

Jayde

Domain names or the lack of them have no relevance in searches here at Jayde. The search software indexes all text in all site entries and a keyword search outputs all instances of that keyword in the database.

AltaVista

The answer is no it does not...

For Simple Queries, AltaVista will rank the results based on a scoring algorithm; documents with a higher score appear at the head of the ranking list. A document has a higher score if the following hold:

• the query words or phrases are found in the first few words of the document (for example, in the title of a Web page or in the headers of Usenet news articles).
• the query words or phrases are found close to one another in the document.
• the document contains more than one instance of the query word or phrase.

You are therefore likely to find what you want close to the head of the resulting list of matches.

LinkStar

[In short, no. Here is the reply I received]

The LinkStar search rating determines the order in which the cards are displayed. An e-Card with a perfect match to the search criteria, will have a rating of 1000, with others being lower. This rating is based on a specific search and will change for different searches. This is not a rating of the quality of the information on the card or the quality of your site, it is a rating of how closely the e-Card matches the search criteria.

The rating is computed on several factors, with the most important being:

• Where in the e-Card the search term occurs.
• The number of times a search term occurs in the e-Card. [more terms will give a higher rating]
• The length of an e-Card. [shorter cards rate higher]

Any particular search may find dozens, hundreds, even thousands of matches to the search criteria. Obviously, everyone would like their listings to be near the top of the listing but, this is not always possible. The best insurance is to make sure that the e-Card can be found in as MANY of the related searches as possible. This is accomplished by including "keywords" within the text of your e-Card, that pertain to your specific site.

WHAT ARE KEYWORDS?

The "keyword" search is the most powerful and by far the most common search available. Our search engine will search the entire "Text" of an e-Card for a match to the search term. Therefore EVERY word within the text of your card could be considered a "keyword".

PlanetSearch

No, the domain name does not have any impact on results. We index the full text of the documents.

HotBot

[In short, no. Here is the reply I received]

The score represents HotBot's confidence in the match. A high score is given to the pages that most likely contain the data you are looking for. A low scoring page contains the search terms, but HotBot has determined that it does probably not include the information you need.

Once the set of matching documents has been identified, the scores are normalized so that no document scores over 100%. If all the documents are poor matches, the best of the poor matches is given a score of 99%.

Each document which matches the requirements of a search is assigned a score. HotBot considers a number of factors when computing these scores. Some of the most basic factors affecting query result scoring include:

• Word frequency in document --- In general, the more often a query word occurs in the document, the higher the score. However, the obscurity of the word also has impact. Common words like "the" contribute less to the score than rare and discriminating words like "tiki".
• Search words in title --- Pages that use your search terms in the title will be ranked significantly higher than documents that contain the search term in the text only.
• Search words in keywords --- Pages that use your search terms in the "keywords" META tag, will be weighted more highly than text words, but less highly than title words.
• Document length --- When the search words appear frequently in a short document, the page will be ranked higher than when the words appear in a long document.

HotBot's proprietary ranking technology is derived from a competition-winning scoring algorithm, which over a large corpus of documents has demonstrated the highest perceived relevance to "typical" users. The HotBot engineers are constantly improving this formula.

Excite

To answer your question, yes, the domain name is an inportant factor in relevancy, however it does not play any more a significant role than does the title or the keywords in our indexing system. For a deeper look into our ICE indexing technology and Excite Search, please refer to http://www.excite.com/Info/searching.html