Major Players in the Search Engine Market companies
Alltheweb - Alltheweb is a crawler based search engine with a gigantic index of crawled webpages. Previously known as FAST/Alltheweb, Overture acquired Alltheweb from FAST in late April 2003. If something can’t be found at Google, a second stop at Alltheweb may be the trick. Alltheweb provides results to several search partners and is also the search engine of choice for many people.
AltaVista - Altavista is one of the oldest and most well known crawler based search engines, however Altavista has struggled in recent years trying to reinvent and increase revenues. In the last year Altavista was purchased by Overture which was subsequently gobbled up by Yahoo. Stay tuned to see what Yahoo will do with Altavista crawler expertise.
AOL - At some point most everyone received an AOL disc in the mail, but this Internet service provider dishes out search results at their web portal too. What kind of results? Directory listings from DMOZ human directory project, Google free index results and Google Adwords results are the primary basis of AOL search. Over a year ago AOLSearch dumped Overture PPC results and added Google Adword PPC results. This relationship has just been strengthened with a multi-year agreement between Google and Adwords.
Ask Jeeves - Now Ask.com serves search results from its crawler based search engine Teoma, and provides payperclick placements from the Google Adwords system. Inclusion in Teoma may occur naturally, but there is a paid inclusion crawler service at Teoma which will crawl page content roughly every 48 hours.
DMOZ - DMOZ Open Directory Project is one of the leading human reviewed Internet Directories. DMOZ provides directory results for AOLsearch and Google. With these two distribution partners, DMOZ or ODP as some people know it, is very important.
Google - Google crawler and indexing technology is TOPS, and some estimates say Google serves well over 70% of all search results in the major U.S. Internet search engines. Google Adwords is also a giant in Payperclick advertising services with results distribution at Google and AOLSearch. Google has for some time served the crawler based (webpages) results at Yahoo, but there could be movement on that front in the near future as Yahoo recently gobbled up Google competitors Altavista and Inktomi.
Inktomi - acquired by Yahoo, Inktomi was a web crawler and indexing technology is tops, and Inktomi index provides search results to MSN, Looksmart, Hotbot and many other sites. Likely in a move to develop their own crawler index
Looksmart - Directory was a major internet search portal for years and has provided prime search results to MSN for a very long time. However the revenue structure has shifted wildly in recent years. Looksmart, looking for revenue like all the majors, went from being a free Directory to a fixed price inclusion directory like Yahoo. Next Looksmart straddled two worlds by being a Directory with content supplied on a Payperclick revenue model at a fixed $.15/click. This model gave way in recent days with the announcement that Looksmart will adopt the bid based result ranking style of Adwords and Overture. Sounds good for revenue projections at Looksmart, but close on the heels of that announcement, MSN as of January 15, 2004, Looksmart results will no longer be featured at MSN. Ouch ! That was up to 65% of Looksmart’s results distribution.
Lycos - Lycos - Now Powere by Ask.com is one of the oldest search engines dating back to 1994, however Lycos ceased to crawl the web to build their own index in 1999.
MSN - MSN has big traffic to their site which of course makes MSN search results a very important venue.
Overture - The industry leader for Keyword research since back when they called themselves goto.com and people laughed at the idea that 1) Companies would pay when someone clicked their listing and 2) That people (searchers) would actually click on a search engine result that was paid for. Ick! Imagine that!
Yahoo - Yahoo, like MSN, has gobs of traffic to their site. Thus the search aspect of Yahoo is huge. Yahoo search results come from theYahoo human compiled directory with fill-in content from Google index and Overture payperclick listings. The volume of traffic to Yahoo is truly gigantic, so we must stay tuned to see what moves Yahoo will make in their search results. There is much speculation since Yahoo has recently acquired, directly or indirectly, Overture payperclick, Inktomi, and Altavista
Major Players in the Search Engine Market companies