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Google spiders the web constantly, the frequency the bots visit individual sites depends on some factors, one being the PageRank.
Other engines have different cycles.
>>The best I can tell is the last time my site was searched was around August 15. How can I tell when it was searched and when the next search will be? Do all search engines search about the same time? And, are metatags necessary? <<
If you have access to server logs, you can look for googlebot. Search Forum3 for more info!
If you don't, you need to either
a) set up the index.html as an shtml page that serves the date when it's accessed
b) turn over the content of your home page daily, perhaps using a "date last saved" field to label the page.
Your next access isn't a "site" access, it's a "per-page" access and it will depend on
a) how popular your page is - how many important sites link to it
b) whether the page changes at all
No, different search engines search at different rates and with different coverage. Once you have a site up where you have a mechanism to see the dates that pages were changed, you can interrogate the various search engines and see dates for last access. Mine vary frm page to page and engine to engine from today back to about January 2003...
DerekH
Alternatively you can look around webmasterworld and see if you can find somebody else who has already done this.
Most sensibly, do all the right things to get frequently respidered (you can learn that here to) then you don't have to worry about when it happens.
SN
Besides the bots crawling the Internet it isn't a bad thing to have meta tags, some engines still use if, if your a person who doesnt believe in it then dont worry too much but I look out for all the search engines so it doesnt matter if ones care or dislike them or not.
Like the others said, check your log files to see when googlebot came through. I check over my log files daily, there are other benifits to going over your log files daily not just about the googlebot. For instance in your refer logs you can see all the people who surfed through other websites to get to your site. You can also see when people are linking directly to your images by requesting it from other sites. :)
