As with most things in life, there are many unethical people within the search engine optimisation field. These people prey on their clients lack of knowledge to sell un-necessary services (“submit your site to over 100 search engines”) and inflate their success (“you are currently number 1 for your keyphrase on 10 search engines”).
Most serious, professional and ethical SEO companies, Epiphany Solutions included, will agree that there are only really 3 search engines that matter, Google, MSN and Yahoo. The vast majority of other search engines will simply pull there search engine results pages (SERPs) from one of these major search engines, so success in these 3 should be paramount to any natural SEO campaign.
Of the 3, Google currently has the largest following with over 60% of all searches being carried out via Google.com and its many country specific variants, .co.uk, .de, .fr etc. Google was first launched in 1997 as part of a research project at Stanford University. Its founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page realised that within acedamia, key papers within any given subject were often referenced by many other papers within that subject area. This idea could be applied to the information found on the World Wide Web to rank sites based on inbound links. This still forms the backbone of the Google search algorithm along with around 100 other factors.
MSN and Yahoo (the other members of the big 3) both have around 15% of the search market each. Yahoo began in 1994 as a list of favourite websites shared between a select group of users. As the number of users grew and with it the list, the need for categories and sub-categories became apparent and Yahoo Directory was born. Although the busiest website in existance, Yahoo is fundementally an information portal with search engine technology bolted on. Originally this search facility was provided by Google but since the purchase of Inktomi in 2003, Yahoo has developed its own search engine technologywhich it now uses.
Microsofts arrival in search happened in 1998 with the arrival of MSN Search. Like Yahoo, originally MSN used other search engines to provide its users with results before developing its own search technology. In 2005, MSN launched its own search engine and began displaying its results to MSN portal users.
The remaining 10% of searches are carried out via smaller search engines such as Ask (formally Ask Jeeves) and clones of the big 3.
Hopefully you now have an idea of which search engines are important and why we at Epiphany Solutions choose to focus on optimising for the big 3.
In future posts I will attempt to demystify how search engines work and give some ideas as to what is ahead in the world of search.