The Lynx Web Browser
– by Ian Cook

Sometimes it pays to revisit old technology to explore how it can be used in today's world. One such older technology is the Lynx web browser.

Lynx is a text-only web browser originally released in 1993 for use in non-graphical work stations. Back then web design was much simpler, consisting of primarily text-based documents with a straight-forward layout. Technologies like CSS, Flash, and Javascript didn't exist back then.

Lynx views the world wide web similarly to a generic search engine spider. Spiders don't see images or flash animations, nor do they pay attention to fancy table-based layouts used to organize your content for the human eye.

In fact, if you view a page in Lynx, you'll see something very similar to what a spider sees when they come crawling. Here's searchengine-news.com, for example:

Here's the same page viewed in Internet Explorer 6:

Taking a close look at the two screen shots above, you can see the order in which the page is read by Lynx, and most likely, by a search engine spider.

By viewing your own pages in this way, you can see more directly where to place your keyword phrases so they'll be more immediately accesible to the search engine spiders.

Lynx is a free download, available here...
http://jim.spath.com/lynx_win32/

Best regards,


Ian Cook - technical analyst
Planet Ocean Communications...