The truth about the major search engines

There are literally thousands of search engines out there on the web today. Yet the vast majority are meaningless in terms of their ability to deliver traffic to your site. Submitting to hundreds or thousands of such sites will actually damage your chances at good rankings on the major engines!

The following are what I consider the major -- and most important -- search engines:

Google

Certainly the #1 ranked search engine in terms of use and delivery of traffic. Because of this, most SEO experts (myself included) will work hardest on achieving good placement on Google's search index. However, there are some things to be aware of. First, Google modifies its search algorithm (rules) probably more frequently than any other search engine. They do this partly to improve their results, but more importantly to foil the thousands of unscrupulous companies that try to "fool" them into listing non-relevant sites. It comes with the territory of being number one... everyone wants high listings on Google -- no one more than the tons of spamming sites! This makes obtaining and keeping high placement on Google more of a challenge. There is an obvious answer, and that is to make sure that your site adheres to the basics of content, relevance, good design, proper coding, and avoidance of "tricks". Those basics have withstood many of Google's algorithm changes, and will always do so.

Google's search results are licensed to many smaller search engines, including the very popular AOL and Netscape.

Yahoo

Most often ranked #2 in search engines, Yahoo generally delivers from 10% - 30% of the traffic that a similarly-ranked Google listing will deliver. Yahoo has been improving its position in the industry of late, and I would look for this ratio to improve somewhat over the next couple of years. Moreover, a number of people who study the search engines have noticed an interesting phenomenon: that although Yahoo will deliver less traffic to your site, they may in fact deliver a higher quality traffic. By that, I mean you may see a higher percentage of visitors referred by Yahoo actually purchase something when compared to your Google traffic. This actually makes sense when you think about it. Since Google draws so many more people, you should expect that a larger percentage of them may be looking for something other than what your site delivers or sells. It has been my experience that sometimes the more sophisticated web users deliberately favor the smaller search engines -- a sort of "snobbishness" if you will -- like "I'm too advanced to bother using that mass tool that everyone uses!"

Yahoo currently owns (and thus influences or provides content to) AltaVista, Overture, Inktomi (a major search technology player), and AllTheWeb. So, by getting a good ranking on Yahoo, you automatically score highly on these other engines and numerous tinier search portals that license their search results.

MSN

Microsoft has finally caught on to the money to be made in search engines, and is working hard to catch up with the likes of Google. Although they have a long way to go, they also have very deep pockets and potential business relationships with many major players. As of this writing, MSN is still providing search results primarily from Yahoo, but this is changing as they continue to develop their own crawler-based indexing technology. Right now perhaps a trickle of traffic, but I'd look for MSN to advance quicker than expected. Definitely not to be ignored.

Ask Jeeves

A bit different than the others, Ask Jeeves purports to do better with "natural English" queries, and initially relied upon a large team of human editors. Today it is also web-crawler based, and incorporates the technology of the Teoma search engine, which it owns.

The Ask Jeeves/Teoma results are also used by Lycos, one of the oldest search engines on the web.

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Of course there are numerous other well-known search engines -- like HotBot (which uses Google and Ask Jeeves results), GigaBlast (which offers a unique past-history snapshot featuring old versions of web pages), LookSmart, WiseNut, and others.

From an SEO perspective, if your site is well-listed on the four major search engines above, you'll be doing just fine!

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Referenced Search Engines:

Google |  Yahoo |  MSN |  Ask Jeeves  |  AOL  |  Netscape  |  AltaVista  |  Overture  |   AllTheWeb  |  Teoma  |  Lycos |  HotBot  |  GigaBlast  |  LookSmart  |  Wisenut