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Web Page Visibility

The Problem

The Web is a big place. Even the local Monash web is a big place. Finding information in such expanses has always been a problem.

The Web has spawned several solutions to this problem: robot-based search engines, subject-based catalogues, announcement services and more. ITS Web and Internet Facilities provides them at a local level. Other companies and organisations provide them at a Net-wide level.

Local indices

Monash People list
Personal home pages contain most of the soul of the Web. Have a look through them, and don't forget to submit yours.
Faculties, Departments and Administration list
All faculties and departments with web pages are listed herein. If yours isn't, contact us now .
search.monash.edu.au
No explicit registry is required for the search engine. Pages will automatically be indexed by the robot as long as
  • the server name is on the robot's list of servers to index
  • the site is linked to from the Monash home page through sites that are also indexed

The Wider World

There are (literally) almost as many ways to find Web resources as there are web pages. Fortunately, most people settle on one or two of a handful of Web navigation aids. If your site is listed in the major indexes, most people will be able to find it.

Most of the major indexes are robot-based search engines, which continually trawl through the known Web looking for new sites to index. If your site is linked-to from another site in their index, it will generally be picked up in the search within a month or two. You can hurry this along by manually submitting your URL to a search engine. All these search engines support manual adding of URLs:

Yahoo is a bit different: although it does search for new sites, they are indexed by subject categories by hand. This means that site submissions help them out a lot more. Since they're probably the biggest of the lot, helping them out is a good idea.

There are services that take your site description and send it to multiple indexes for you. " Submit It! " is one such service: it comes in both free and non-free flavours, and has been around for a while now.

More information on Web publicity