Google has increased in popularity
tenfold the past several years. They have gone from
beta testing, to becoming the Internet's largest
index of web pages in a very short time. Their spider,
affectionately named "Googlebot", crawls
the web and provides updates to Google's index about
once a month.
It will usually take several months for altavista
to index your entire site. Unlike Google, altavista
will only crawl and index 1 link deep, so it takes
a good amount of time to index your site depending
on how large your site is. Altavista gets most of
it's results from its own index.
Inktomi's popularity grew several years ago as
they powered the secondary search database that
had driven Yahoo!. Since then, Yahoo as switched
to using Google as their secondary search and back
end database, however Inktomi is just as popular
now, as they were several years ago, if not more
so. Inktomi powers many sites search results.
A few years ago if you would have whispered "DMOZ"
in someone's ear, they would have thought you were
crazy. Today the human edited directory over at
dmoz.org, called the 'Open Directory Project', or
ODP, and its dead link crushing robot called "Robozilla",
powers the results of over 200 search engines and
directories. Some of the engines that use the results
include AOLsearch, Netscape search, MSN, and many
more. . As you can see, getting your site listed
with ODP, means good news, as eventually ( it sometimes
takes months ) your site will appear in the engines
that use the ODP data. Google also uses ODP data
for its directory located at http://directory.google.com/,
and Google also uses the ODP description in its
normal listings if the site is listed in the ODP.
Excite has been around the web for many years
now. Much more of a portal than just simply a search
engine, Excite used to be a fairly popular search
engine, until companies such as Google seemed to
have dominated the search engine market.
Yahoo! is one of the oldest web directories and
portals on the Internet today, and the site went
live in August of 1994. Yahoo! is a 100% human edited
directory, and provides secondary search results
using Google.
Yahoo! is also one of the largest traffic generators
around, as far as web directories and search engines
go. Unfortunately, however, it is also one of
the most difficult to get listed in, unless of
course you pay to submit your site. Even if you
pay ( $299 USD as of this writing ) it doesn't
guarantee you will get listed.
Getting a listed with Looksmart could mean getting
a good amount of traffic to your site. Looksmart's
results appear in many search engines, including
Altavista, MSN, CNN, and many others.
