Some companies often misunderstand how major search engines work. Some webmasters think that search engines search only for information in METAtags -- special keywords embedded in the headers of Web pages. They think that only these "keywords" count.

That is not the case. Databases use "keywords." With databases you need to organize information in order to retrieve it later. But serious search engines use a full-text index. Every word on every page matters, and not just individual words, but the order of the words as well -- words combined as phrases. Creative use of this full-text search capability can produce very interesting and unexpected results.

A D V E R T I S E M E N T

Many people have been trained to think a database is the only way to manage large amounts of information. Setting up a database requires defining fields, categorizing information, etc. It takes a lot of work to set that up and a lot of work to maintain it.

Crawler based search engines' indexes have no categories. Text is stored, not just information about text. A search makes a direct one-to-one match with text that appears on Web pages, not with marketing descriptions of Web pages.

Any time you use your human intelligence to make judgments on information to split it up into categories, you are making that information less accessible and less flexible in the long run.

Think of a typical work environment thirty years ago. There were rows and rows of file cabinets, and a clerk would go through, very carefully, filing things, day after day. Eventually he gets a gold watch and goes away, and suddenly hundreds or even thousands of files will never be found -- no matter how well that person followed the rules.

Likewise, with a database, you are putting information into pigeonholes. What happens when the categories of the world change?

Six years ago, there was no Web. Many of the categories that we normally use in our day-to-day business lives today didn't exist six years ago. Any set of information that we categorized back then would be much less useful to us today. And five years from now in the future, the world will have changed again.

In this style, you don't necessary need to categorize information to have good access to it. And no matter how the world changes, you should still be able to find what you want.