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Link this ArticleGoogle is the biggest search engine around, with Yahoo and MSN right behind it. All the other search engines, that cover under 1% of the world's searches, dont really matter, and wont get you anywhere in the long run. And remember, AOL runs off of Google's results, so if you rank high on Google, you will rank high on AOL, which gives you one less search engine to worry about. Below are the main differences between each of the main search engines. Although each search engine have different algorithms, they all mainly run along the same guidelines.
Heres Google!
Google, as you probably know, is the most used and biggest search engine of all time. Google is a great search engine and provides relevant results. For most people when they are looking for something, google is the first thing that pops into their head. Although Google might not be a SEO experts favorite search engine, mainly because its hard to rank high on, it is the most valuable to be ranked on. As a quick note, Google is most strict. It is common for sites to rank high in MSN and maybe high in Yahoo, but to rank very low in Google. One thing Google hates are spam sites. If Google thinks your one for any reason your site may be deleted from its index, which destroys all your time and effort. So Google is the one you can't mess with when trying to blackhat, which is obviously not recommended.
Brief History
Google began as a research project in January 1996 by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two Ph.D. students at Stanford. Then is 1998, they named their technology "Google". Soon after the two turned it into a privately held company. And it still is today.
Google's Index
Google indexes on the web pages using its GoogleBot. The GoogleBot browses and indexes website to be ranked by Google. The GoogleBot, although we don't know for sure, is a large application that 'crawls' the pages of the internet. Lets say it starts at Page A. From Page A, it decides to index or update the page if its already indexed. Then, the GoogleBot finds links to external websites from Page A to Page B, C, D, and etc. It follows those links to the other pages, and repeats that same proccess millions and millions times per day. So if you have a page that exists on your server, but you dont have any links going to it from any pages that are indexed in Google, Google will never index that page because Google can't find the page if no other pages are linking to it. That is one of the reasons it is important to have alot of websites linking to your website.
Yahoo!
Heres Yahoo!
Yahoo is another search engine that is used by many people. One of the reasons it is so popular, is because the vast majority of people using free webmail use Yahoo's webmail service, along with there many other features.
Yahoo's Index
Most search engine's crawler or 'bot' use basicly the same concepts. So Yahoo's Bot follows the same things found above in the "GoogleBot" paragraph. Refer their if you havnt already. Also, please note: Yahoo's crawler consists of 3 different crawlers which were purchased in 2003 by Yahoo. They were Inktomi, AltaVista and FAST's AllTheWeb. So anything you hear about those crawlers, would be the same for Yahoo.
MSN
Heres MSN!
MSN, again, is a search engine used by many people. Although it isn't as popular as yahoo or google, it is still sometimes a good source of traffic. But MSN should not be your main concern. MSN's indexing bot uses the same conpets as the Googlebot does.