Search engines are like some cliché I can’t think of at the moment. Everyone has a favorite that they use, but what are the real top search engines?
The best. The top. What does this really mean? Isn’t the best or top of something a very subjective thing? At the Oscars, they usually give the best movie award to something neither I nor anyone else has seen and I don’t live in a trailer park. Okay, I saw the Lord of the Rings, but you get my point.
When it comes to search engines, the news is good. The subjective nature of “top” and “best” classifications is stripped out. Why? Because we are not talking about the engine that produces the best results or looks the best or whatever. Instead, we are looking at them from a search engine optimization point of view and this means one thing – traffic.
What is traffic? On the web, it is a good thing. The more, the better. Traffic simply means the number of people using a website for something. Myspace is a hugely popular social networking site. Millions use it, particularly kids. It therefore has a lot of traffic. Search engines are looked at the same way.
The search engine that has the most traffic, and is thus “best”, is Google. Yahoo comes in with a silver medal, controlling about half of what Google does. Lagging behind the pace in third place is the big, bad Microsoft machinating known as Live Search. You know it as MSN.com. That is it. These three search engines control the vast amount of traffic and your search engine optimization efforts should be focused on them with Google getting priority.
Ah, but what about the other search engines? AOL? Dogpile? Well, there is a nasty little secret about search on the web. It is incestuous. Many of the smaller engines actually use search results produced by one of the three big boys. Google provides results to AOL. When you search on AOL, you are seeing a variation of Google results. Dogpile is actually a combination of Google, MSN and Yahoo results.
Despite the herd of search engines you can find on the web, there are really only three big players. Google is king. Yahoo is the queen. MSN? The joker?
Aazdak Alisimo writes
search engine optimization tips for SEOServiceCompanies.com.
