SEO for major search engines

Brief Overview of Major Search Engines

Search engines are a competitive market.  Google currently claims the largest percentage of the market, with approximately twice the market share as it’s closest competitor, Yahoo.  After those, MSN and Ask.com round out the top 4.  Each of the top engines has features that set them apart.  The following is a brief look at the top 4, why they made the rank, and what sets them apart from all the others.

Google
Google boasts an astounding amount of search relevance in simple as well as complex searches.  Developed by students at Stanford, Google’s patented PageRank algorithms, and extensive webcrawling routines set it far above its competitors.  Considered the standard by which web marketing tactics are measured means that much of the SEO and SEM efforts target acceptance and relevance ratings here above all others.  Google, for its part, is secretive about the precise methods used to achieve ranking, leaving market professionals to deduce what works by looking at the overall composition of previously successful pages.  Google is known to use site relevance ratings from other search engines and directories as part of the data used in its algorithms.

Yahoo
Many people who don’t use Yahoo for searching still use it as their start page.  Yahoo’s user interface is designed to be a jumping off portal, and in that it succeeds very well.  Not only does it provide hundreds of preselected news and entertainment feeds, but it also allows users to create their own modules in the form of RSS feeds.  Add to that the fact that Yahoo is the world’s #2 search engine, and you’ve got a lot of power literally at your fingertips.  Amazingly, the number 2 position can only claim 20% of the search engine market share.  Yahoo searches are fast and fairly reliable, even though nothing comes close to Google for overall search relevance. 

MSN
Microsoft’s entry into the realm of searches relies on the parent company name to drive its popularity.  As the newest comer to the market, the MSN search engine offers little in the way of innovations, whether in it’s search methods, or on the offerings of the site.  MSN tends to be less stringent for new sites, and is often the best site for newcomers to get a foothold.  Since other search engines query MSN, being included here is a vote of confidence for getting inclusion or rank at Google or Yahoo.  The flip side is that the same holds true for junk and spam, and MSN is still a little more cluttered with that type of material.  Things change with time, and Microsoft is pretty well assured of gaining more popularity as time goes on.  Google makes use of MSN in determining overall site rankings.

Ask
Has evolved a bit over its inception as a question and answer tool.  default search operation is “AND”, which means that normal searches will return results based on the existence of ALL words in the query.  Comparative searches are available using the “OR” and “ORR” modifiers in upper case, but complex searches are still being improved.  Claiming less than 10% of the search market is still an impressive accomplishment against such giants as Yahoo and Google.  Ask is a highly rated and often referenced directory in Google page PageRanking.

Article written by SEOnotepad.com