Search Engine Roundup
Date: 17 December 2001

The world of search engines continues to be ever changing and dynamic with engines closing down, merging, and more going to the paid submission/placement model. Here's a brief round-up of some of the latest developments:

Yahoo - http://www.yahoo.com
Yahoo listings have been going through a tidy up and re-organisation of categories for the last few months. They are now more strict on what are commercial and non commercial categories and always prefer to categorise sites firstly on a regional basis. There is also talk of Yahoo ranking sites based on keywords in domain names amongst other things (see below).

Yahoo.com also has a featured listing section at the top of the results. Cost for appearing in this is from US$25 per month, depending on the category. . Yahoo is to add paid listings from Overture.

Excite - http://www.excite.com
Excite has recently been acquired by Infospace. This means search results at Excite are expected to be powered by InfoSpace-owned Dogpile ( a meta search service). Dogpile's results are heavily dominated by paid listings including those from Overture, Looksmart, Sprinks and FindWhat.com.

Infospace have also acquired the Webcrawler domain but its currently unclear whether this search engine will remain active. Excite was the oldest crawler remaining of the major search engines, now that title goes to AltaVista.

HotBot - http://hotbot.lycos.com
Current reports suggest that HotBot is now placing less importance on listings for sites submitted by using their free "add url" option and more on sites found from other "relevant" links. It seems the trend towards paid priority listing options and the removal of free search engine listings is unfortunately moving quite quickly.

FAST - http://www.alltheweb.com
Fast is rapidly gaining prominence. Paid listings are due soon – in beta test at present.

Google - http://www.google.com
Google recently expanded its index to include over 2 billion web pages, making it the largest search engine index. Google makes heavy use of link analysis to boost page rankings. Both the number, quality and context of links pointing at a page are taken into account.

Top Referring Engines and Directories
The most important sources of referrals for our clients remain Yahoo, Google and MSN. Locally, Xtra MSN is also an important source of traffic as it is the default search engine for Xtra customers.

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