Search Engines

How will people find your site? Some of them will have seen your website URL in advertising, but many people will find your site through search engines. There are a few key search engines, with several up-and-coming contenders. And there's one crucial search engine you've probably never heard of that feeds all of the commercial search engines.

	Google is the king of search engines, a position it has earned since 1998 through both technical quality and marketing success. Google prioritizes sites using a proprietary Page Rank process. Their success is marked by their name becoming a verb, as in "Did you Google the guy you're dating?"
	AllTheWeb is a new arrival that seems technically at least as good as Google, and they're sweeping the web more frequently than anybody else. Their marketing has not caught on yet. This site showcases FAST search algorithms.
	AltaVista was developed in 1995 to showcase the power of DEC's AltaVista computers. It was once the leading search engine pre-Google, but started losing ground in 1998. They started 2003 preparing for a comeback; in February 2003 they were bought by Overture, a company that sells highly targeted ad space on search engines.
	AOL is the search engine that a lot of first-time and home web users rely on. Although their market share is decreasing, if your audience is the general public AOL is a major consideration. AOL duplicates Google and DMOZ data.
	MSN is the search engine set up as the default for many business computers. If your audience is business people at work, you'll want to pay attention to MSN. Note that MSN duplicates Google and DMOZ entries.
	Yahoo is possibly the "original" search engine since 1994. They've tried to reposition from search engine to portal with mixed results. They've been eclipsed by Google and hit a financial crunch, but a lot of people still use Yahoo for their searches. Since Yahoo duplicates listings in DMOZ and Google, and requires a fee for registering dot-com's, we do not recommend direct placement with Yahoo.
	DMOZ, a.k.a. the Open Directory Project (ODP), is a non-profit search engine staffed by volunteers. This human-powered directory is in sharp contrast to the web-crawling automated indexes. All the major search engines license the DMOZ database, making it an effective and free (but not speedy) back-door path to search engine listings.

There are different techniques that we place inside your website to help the search engines deal with your site. An important exercise is to try to anticipate what phrases people will be typing into search engines when they are looking for the things you offer-- for instance, "credit union employee surveys", "merchandise incentive program", or "Pittsburgh business website design".