Among the many competitors to Google and Bing, is well recognised search engine by Majestic SEO. This popular search engine uses volunteers from around the world to help crawl and index sites. One of the most popular features of Majestic SEO’s search engine—designated Majestic 12 Distributed Search Engine—is its ability to index all of the backlinks of even the largest sites, like Amazon or Wikipedia, using its Site Explorer app.
Majestic SEO’s marketing director Dixon Jones announced recently that Site Explorer will now support integration with the popular social media network Twitter. This new functionality will allow webmasters who would like to share a link on Majestic’s Site Explorer to immediately Tweet it without any of the hassle of copy and paste. Tweets can also now include full page snapshots of a Site Explorer results page.
A primary difference between Google and Majestic 12 Distributed Search Engine is the way the Majestic search engine indexes sites. Instead of merely crawling the content, Majestic analyzes the number and quality of the links. The more links to reputable domains elevates the rank of the site. Therefore, Google is more adept at distinguishing pages which may have similar or duplicate content, Majestic is less able to make such distinctions.
Majestic also displays search results in a spreadsheet format with total number of backlinks, both external and to referring Domains. The search results also include the date when the site was crawled so that users can be assured that the information displayed is current and accurate. Majestic also includes a number of analytics which can evaluate the types of backlinks. Although Majestic has not yet declared war on paid links like Google has, it is working on an algorithm that will better differentiate between paid and organic links. Majestic allows users to purchase a backlink analysis at a cost dependent upon the number of links.
Originally founded in 2004 as an alternative to giant Google, Majestic SEO has grown into a major business with more than a hundred regular servers which perform crawling and analysis, along with more than 150 other distributed clients. Majestic performs search at about 500 Mbit/sec, which allows it to crawl almost 200 million URLs per day.
According to Majestic SEO’s chief executive officer Alex Chudnovsky, the organization hopes to one day rival Google. In order to achieve this, Majestic has employed a number of technical innovations including data storage issues. Majestic is attempting to crawl and index as much of the digital universe as Google, but it is also employing re-crawls which will assist in maintaining an accurate picture of websites which have instituted significant changes.
Among the many services that Majestic offers is AC Rank, which is similar to Google’s PageRank. AC Rank evaluates the importance of a web page by tallying the number links. While not as reliable as PageRank because it does not follow links to other pages, Majestic hopes to improve its functionality in the near future.
