Search Engine Relationships

Search Engine Relationships
Search engines come and go, get bought by other companies, and are powered by other engines. I have read articles about search engine optimization saying don't bother submitting to this or that search engine because it is the same as X. Usually only one or two engines are covered per article. I did find one chart that gives the relationships for twenty one engines. http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum5/1234.htm Unfortunately it is dated 2003 which means some of the info is outdated.
I plan a two prong attack. Refine my search terms and find more current pages. The second approach will be to go to the search engines, then their about page and poke around. We will see which is faster.
I wish I had written down the time when I started the search for charts approach. Fast! The first step was to look at the page I had and find terms that would be in any similar page that I want to check out. Search Engine Relationship Chart “ Copy and paste into Google and one million plus results. The top result is to Bruceclay.com http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm He has registered Search Engine Relationship Chart™ as a registered Trademark. The chart looks to be current as of March of 2006. Do check out the histogram on
http://www.bruceclay.com/serc_histogram/histogram.htm Push the slider back to November 2000 and see how crowded the field use to be. Way cool.
Refining the search probably took all of five minutes. Before I started writing this I looked around on the about pages for Altavista and for Ask. I think I spent fifteen minutes looking and reading. For Altavista you go from the about page to the business page to the submit a site page before you find out that they are powered by yahoo. I guess I wouldn't tell all my potential customers that someone else provides the same or more complete results either.

Five engines power todays web search. Ask.com, Google.com, Domz.org, Yahoo.com, and MSNsearch.com. The rest use the results of one or more of the five.