Glossary - P

packet sniffing
The practice of monitoring pieces of data (called packets) as they move over the Internet.

page jacking / pagejacking
The act of duplicating a (usually high ranking) web page and presenting the duplicate as the original. This kind of blatant theft is fairly uncommon. In most cases the legitimate author / owner can easily prove ownership of the material.

PageRank
Google 's measure of the link popularity of a page.

PageRank hoarding
The practice of getting as many inbound links as possible while giving as few outbound links as possible. This is done in attempt to increase PageRank / link popularity . Regarded as spam .

page view / page impression / page request
Often confused with a hit , the term refers to the actual number of pages (not files) viewed by all visitors to a site in a given time period. The number of page views (and other statistics) can be obtained through log file analysis .

paid listing
A listing on a SERP that is achieved through outbidding competitors (as in PPC ). The term is sometimes also used to refer to keyword -targeted advertisements, where the advertiser pays the search engine a fixed amount to have its ad shown on the SERP for a specific keyword.

parentheses
Some search engines allow users to use parenthesis ( ) to group words. This is especially useful in Boolean searchers .

partial word matching
Some search engines will consider not only exact matches , but also partial matches. This means that if the search term is contained within a word in a document in its index , the search engine considers the document a match . It's not as complicated as it sounds though. If the user enters "word" as the query , the search engine will consider a document a match if it contains word or wordiness or foreword or MSWord etc. So the search term should be contained in the word.

phrase search
A search for documents containing an entire phrase - as opposed to one or more keywords . The important distinction here is that in a phrase search, the words has to appear side by side in the document (exactly as in the query ) for that document to be considered a match . If the words appear scattered or they appear side by side but in the wrong sequence, it is not considered a match. Phrase searching can be done on most search engines by simply enclosing the phrase in quotation marks.

portal
A web site that functions as a kind of starting page or entry point to the web. Portals typically have a wide variety of features such as search, free web-based e-mail, news etc. Well-known examples include Excite and Yahoo .

PPCPay-Per-Click. An advertising payment model where the advertiser pays only when the advertisement is actually clicked. In other words, the advertiser literally pays only for visitors rather than per advertisement impression . The term CPC (cost per click) is sometimes used in the place of PPC and the plural PPCs is sometimes used to refer to PPC search engines .

PPC search engine / PPCSE
A search engine that uses the PPC (pay per click) payment model, also known as the CPC (cost per click) model. Advertisers bid on keywords they wish to target. The search results are then ranked based on the bids with the highest bidder's site ranked first. Advertisers only pay when their links are clicked - not every time their sites appear in the results. PPCSE marketing has become a fairly important and potentially effective online marketing technique. We take a look at some of the important PPC search engines (like Overture )

PPL
A system where the receiving site pays a certain amount to the referring site for every new lead .

PPV
Pay per visit. Same as PPC only the term "visit" is used instead of "click".

precision
Search engines will often consider a document a match to a query when that document is not really relevant to the query. These mistakes happen because search engines, to a certain extent, have to "guess" what the user is looking for - especially when words used in the query have double meanings. Search engines must find a balance between recall (it's ability to find all relevant documents) and precision (it's ability to find only relevant documents). The aim in information retrieval is to get both recall and precision spot-on. In other words to return all relevant documents and nothing else. In the real search engine world however, it is often a trade-off. Precision is scored by dividing the total number of pages found by the number of relevant pages found. For example, if 1000 documents are found and 770 are relevant, the search engine's precision is 0.77 or 77%.