Keeping up with the search engine world is important not just for marketers and researchers but also site developers, since the way a search engine views a site is closely related to site design and content structure. Search engine specialists should be brought in during the design and development of the Web site templates, and not after site creation, he said. Link popularity is a growing feature affecting site ranking at search engines like Google, thus providing growing impetus to the convergence between publishing and linking of content on the Web. Hence it is important for sites to actively promote links to themselves from other sites, via techniques like link exchanges, referrals, affiliates, Web rings, and inclusion in yellow pages sites as well as vertical industry hubs. Challenges arise for search engine and directory companies in weeding out 'dead' links, keeping up with sites that deal with rapidly breaking news, reporting traffic on cached pages, ensuring online privacy, dealing with pornographic or hate content, and thwarting spammers.
Challenges arise in devising search engines for double-byte languages, like most Asian languages.
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