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Search Engines
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The major search engines are the most important places to be listed, because they can attract many visitors to our site.
For general purpose searches, the major search engines produce dependable results, and most users of the web know this. Some engines may specialise ( for example, one engine might be considered to have an "academic" focus), but unless your website is unusual, promoting it via the major search engines is likely to represent the best return on the time invested.
The search engines below are good choices to start with, both when searching for information, and when evaluating how well your own site currently ranks:
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 Google
http://www.google.com
Google is a fully automated search engine, which employs robots known as 'spiders' to crawl the web on a monthly basis and find sites for inclusion in the Google index. Since this process does not involve human editors, it is NOT necessary to submit your site to Google in order to be included in its index. In fact, the vast majority of sites listed are not manually submitted for inclusion.
Google does not accept payment for inclusion of sites in their index, nor for improving the rank of sites in their results. They do offer advertising opportunities adjacent to their results, which are clearly labeled "Sponsored Links."
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 Yahoo
http://search.yahoo.com/
The goal of Yahoo! Search is to discover and index all of the content available on the web to provide the best possible search experience to users. The Yahoo! Search index, which contains several billion web pages, is more than 99% populated through the free crawl process. Yahoo! also offers several ways for content providers to submit web pages and content directly to the Yahoo! Search index and the Yahoo! Directory.
Like Google, Yahoo sells paid placement advertising links that appear on its own site and which are distributed to others. These are sold through Overture, which is owned by Yahoo.
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 MSN
http://search.msn.com
In early 2005, Microsoft abandoned its previous arrangement with Yahoo, and introduced its own search engine. The new facility was built from scratch, including their own crawler and indexing algorithm. MSN is a serious contender with a large share of the search market.
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 Teoma
http://www.teoma.com
Teoma is the crawler-based search engine which powers Ask Jeeves. It is smaller than Google and Yahoo. However, being large doesn't make much of a difference when it comes to popular queries, and Teoma's won praise for its relevancy since it appeared in 2000. Some people also like its "Refine" feature, which offers suggested topics to explore after you do a search. The "Resources" section of results is also unique, pointing users to page that specifically serve as link resources about various topics. Teoma was purchased by Ask Jeeves in September 2001 and also provides some results to that web site.
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 Excite
http://msxml.excite.com/info.xcite/
Excite is a "metacrawler" search engine. Excite metasearch technology automatically returns the top combined results from the Web's leading search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Ask Jeeves. The enquirer receives a spectrum of results wider than can be obtained using any single search engine.
By examining Excite results, you can gain a simple and quick evaluation of your site's general visibility. |
 The Open Directory
http://dmoz.org/
Whilst not a first choice for searching, the Open Directory is nevertheless important because many of the other engines draw information from it.
The Open Directory is the most widely distributed data base of Web content classified by humans. Its editorial standards body of net-citizens provide the collective brain behind resource discovery on the Web. The Open Directory powers the core directory services for the Web's largest and most popular search engines and portals, including Netscape Search, AOL Search, Google, Lycos, HotBot, DirectHit, and hundreds of others. |
 KartOO
http://www.kartoo.com
KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm.
Kartoo is an excellent tool for analysing your website's presence in the context of your ranking competitors.
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Other Search Facilities
If you need a more complete list, then a useful reference can be found here: http://www.allsearchengines.com/complete.html
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