Profiles of the Major Search Engines
by Ryan P. Allis, CEO of Virante, Inc.


Note: This is Chapter Three from Obtaining a #1 Ranking in the Search Engines

As I stated above, one problem leading to so much confusion is that search engine technology, spidering capabilities, ranking criteria, and strategic alliances are all changing rapidly.

So let’s take a look at each of the major search engines.

First, however, let me make a very important distinction. Most people know who the major players are in the world of search engines. However, few know from where the search results come on each of these major engines. Many people believe that each provides its own results. This leads them to think they must submit to every single engine individually and manage their listings on each. This is simply not true.

In fact, all the results on the top ten search engines are derived from just five sources. What does this mean? Well, essentially, you only need to submit your web site to be spidered by five different engines.

Let’s first look at the profile each engine and then determine which five places we need to submit to.

Profiles of the Major Search Engines
Alexa Ranking1	Engine	Results from	Paid results from
1	Yahoo	crawler-based results from Google2	Overture
2	MSN	crawler based results from Inktomi3	Overture
5	Google	own crawler-based database	Google Adwords
23	AOL Search	crawler-based results from Google	Google Adwords
28	Lycos	crawler-based results from FAST	Overture
284	Hotbot	crawler-based results from Teoma	Overture
42	Altavista	own crawler-based results	Overture
48	Netscape	crawler-based results from Google	Google Adwords
72	Ask Jeeves	crawler-based results from Teoma5	Google Adwords
231	FAST/Alltheweb.com	own crawler-based database	Overture
[1] As of May 24, 2002. Note: Alexa rankings are an estimate of the popularity of the full web site, not of the popularity of the search feature on the site. [2] Yahoo’s main results changed from human directory listings to Google’s in May 2002. Human-reviewed directory results are found through the Yahoo Web Directory [3] with additional results from the pay for inclusion directory Looksmart [4] Lycos address is http://www.lycos.com, Hotbot address is http://hotbot.lycos.com [5] with additional results from human-developed directory

From this comparison chart you can see that although there are ten major search engines, you really only must submit to five locations to be listed on all of them. These are Google, FAST, Inktomi, Teoma, and Altavista. Of these five, Google is undoubtedly the most important as it supplies listings for its own engine, Yahoo, AOL Search, and the default Netscape Search, among many others.

Many search engines today no longer crawl the Web to build their own unique index of Web sites.  Instead, they will license an index from one of these five engines. I will talk about each one of these in detail later on and give specific submission guidelines and advice for each.

Now let’s take a look at the fictional business and website I will use to illustrate the techniques given throughout the rest of this guide.