As the author of the WWW FAQ, I regularly answer questions about the workings of the Web. If a question is frequently asked, I simply add an article to the FAQ. But sometimes a question is more detailed, more in-depth— not really a FAQ, but still of interest to others. You'll find those questions, with my answers, here in Innards along with commentary on other web-technology-related topics.

Q. What is the legal difference between a web site that has been put on the web but has not been submitted to search engines, and a web site that is on search engines? If a company wants to publish a site while they are building it, prior to putting it on search engines, is this legally considered the same as being on a search engine?

Thank you... I have talked with four attorneys and none seem to know the answer.

A. Hey, I'm a technical guy, not a lawyer. But I can tell you that there is no formal "getting listed on the search engine" process. Quite the opposite. Search engines usually find you by following links to your site made by others on the web, often without your knowledge.

Yes, it is possible to manually tell search engines about your site (see my article "how do I promote my web site?" for details). But search engines can and will find you anyway, the very moment that people begin talking about and linking to your site from their blogs.

Linking to other people's sites, by the way, is legal in all but a handful of circumstances. See my article is it legal to link to other web sites? for more details on this subject.

So if you're not ready for something to be seen by the public... don't put it on the web yet! If you want to test it "live," that's fine - but set up a password for access until you're ready for the public. For details on how to do that, see my article how do I password-protect my web site? You'll be interested primarily in the second solution presented in that article. Your web host might offer a more convenient interface for this purpose in its control panel.

There are ways, technically speaking, to go out of your way to stay out of search engines by requesting that they not index your site. I'm not aware of any legal mechanisms that might require search engines to respect such requests, but the major search engines honor them because they have nothing to gain by antagonizing webmasters. For the details, see my article how do I keep my web site out of Google and other search engines?

In general, there is little or no reason to involve lawyers in the process of keeping your site private until it is ready to be public. Lawyers are expensive. There are far too many people out there potentially linking to any web site that looks appealing. And there are simple technical fixes that work. So use them.