November 2003

Searching for the right search engines?

Sam Steane

In this two-parter, Sam Steane deciphers the search engines and offers tips about which ones are worth bothering about in a search engine marketing campaign.

The search engine world is complex and fast-moving. What with all the acquisitions, company failures, changes in algorithms and the battle against spam, it's not surprising people are confused as to which search engines to submit to.

So, which search engines are worth bothering about?

Google
Google was established in 1998 and has become the most popular search engine. This has been due mostly to the relevancy of its search results, its very large database and its clean, uncluttered search interface. It's features like these that have enabled Google to eclipse many of the older search engines such as AltaVista and Lycos.

What Google likes most of all are good page titles, good content and lots of incoming links. If you change your content on a regular basis, your website should be indexed more frequently. Google also supplies search results to Yahoo! and AOL, although its relationship with Yahoo will soon be coming to an end.

Google has also introduced a variety of features in addition to its search, such as image search, news search, newsgroups and Froogle - which allows you to search on items you can buy on the web. Other features include Google catalogues, where hard copy shopping catalogues have been made available on the web to browse, and Google wireless search for handheld computers. Not all of these features are available yet in the UK, however.

Google is making moves towards a possible floatation next year, and is also in talks with Microsoft, so 2004 may bring interesting times for Google.

AlltheWeb (FAST)
AlltheWeb is the search interface of FAST, a Norwegian search engine. It is becoming more popular for its relevant results and large database. There are no country-specific searches available, however FAST allows users to search either English language websites, or to include websites of any language. Other than AlltheWeb, FAST's other main search interface is on Lycos, for which it provides primary search results.

Changes this year, however, have seen FAST being taken over by Overture, which in turn has been taken over by Yahoo!

Ask Jeeves
Ask Jeeves became popular for its natural language search facility (and, of course, the unforgettable Jeeves the Butler, there to answer all your questions). Ask Jeeves is more of a portal than a clean search interface, such as Google and FAST. It draws pay per click results into its natural search results and banners on its search interface. Other natural search results come from Teoma, a relatively new search engine developed by the Ask Jeeves team. Ask Jeeves is still independent, and its continued popularity is perhaps partly down to its offline advertising spend.

MSN
One of the most popular portals on the internet, MSN is well worth bothering about. In fact MSN has a portal in 37 countries and languages, which means it has one of the biggest audience reaches for a portal. Microsoft does not have its own search engine, so results are fed from Inktomi, with a few pay per click results from Overture.

Inktomi
Inktomi does not have its own search interface, and from that respect is not a well known search engine to the masses. However, it provides search results to many portals including MSN (as mentioned above), Overture, Hotbot, Looksmart & Excite. This search engine is another of Yahoo!'s acquisitions, and may soon replace Google on Yahoo!'s web page results.

Lycos
Lycos is also still a popular portal, targeting a young audience of 18-35 year olds - demonstrated in the amount of chat, SMS messaging, shopping and flirt channels. As with MSN, it has its search results provided by another search engine (FAST) plus pay per click results from Overture. Lycos remains independent and is a joint venture between Lycos Inc and Bertelsmann AG of Germany.

AltaVista
AltaVista's popularity declined when it went down the portal route and took on banner advertising, cluttering up its search interface. However, it has now reversed this and has been redesigned with a much cleaner search interface. AltaVista has now been taken over by Overture and Yahoo! and does not provide search results to any other search portal.

Other search engines:

Other than the above well-known search engines, there are a few others struggling for more exposure. These are:

Mirago.co.uk a UK search engine
Gigablast.com
Entireweb.com
Aesop.com

All of these search engines are free to submit to, so including them in your campaign will not do any harm, but it's impossible to say how many visitors a listing with them will provide.

The search engine scene is changing all the time - you never know who will be the next Google, or which search engine will be the next acquisition.

In part two next month I'll be looking at how to manage search engine submissions and what to look out for ... plus a peek at what the future may bring.