Search Engine Guide - Reference and Reviews
Read Reviews of Search Engines, From the Top Engines to Targetted Pay Per Click

First you should know that there are different kinds of search engines. There are major search engines that are very popular and well used.

 There are also Meta Engines (see Meta-Heuristics: Advances and Trends in Local Search Paradigms for Optimization) that pull results from several search engines at once and then blend the results into one page.

There are also Pay per Click Search engines that allow you to submit sites for a fee, usually a bid for click type. This type of  allows you to select the keywords, terms and phrases that best describe your website and choose how much you would like to pay

To get started with our discussion on search engines we are going to focus on the first group mentioned -- the major ones.

Google.com - http://www.google.com

 Google is a household name that millions of people use every day to find whatever they seek. A search engine that has been voted the "Most Outstanding Search Engine" by Search Engine Watch readers, Google employs a crawler based service as well as a pay for inclusion service with Google Adsense. We have provided a link here so you can take a look.

Google also provides much more for users. Using the the links above their search bar searches can also be performed on images, groups, maps and more. However, from our perspective of helping webmasters we want to focus on helping you get indexed and traffic from this major engine.

A little history on Google.

Google started out as a university project at Stanford University by students Larry Page and Sergey Brin. This project was called "Backrub". By 1998 the name had been changed to Google and moved off campus as a private company start up. Since then Google has gone public with a filing of a huge IPO on April 30, 2004. Its shares were offered in an unusual "online auction" in a bid to make its shares more available.

Based on results from  July 2006, Google is the top search engine based on share of search queries with 49.2%, Yahoo is second with 23.8%, and MSN is 3rd with 9.6% according to Nielsen NetRatings Search Engine Ratings.

If you have followed our advice in previous chapters on general site basics and keyword optimization, then you are already well on your way to getting indexed by Google. If your site targets a niche, and has plenty of content for users to be interested in, you will find that you should rank well for your keywords as Google drives to provide relevant results for searchers.

 If you have followed our basic instructions in our Chapter "General Site Basics"  and have created some links to your site form others sites related to your content then you should be comfortable now to submit your site to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl/?continue=/addurl

Yahoo is another other major search engine. The creators of Yahoo are  David Filo and Jerry Yang, Ph.D. candidates in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. They began to create a directory of their favorite web sites while in school - Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web. This directory grew from groups of sites to subgroups. As the popularity of their directory grew amongst peers and others,  they knew they had the makings of a business and after meeting with venture capitalists, got funding and thereby created Yahoo!.  In the past, you had to submit your site to Yahoo for the opportunity to be listed in their directory. Now in present day, Yahoo! Slurp: Yahoo's Web-indexing Robot  indexes millions of pages for their search directory.

Yahoo.com Search Marketing

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So much like Google, you can do well by creating a niche site with lots of content to get a listing with Yahoo!. Yahoo!, like Google, also has a pay for inclusion service called Yahoo Search Marketing. To submit your site to Yahoo, Yahoo! Sponsored Search lists your business on top sites like Yahoo!, AltaVista and CNN. Sign up and get a $25 credit.