The Search Engine Relationship

Search Engines – Who Feeds Who?

In contrary to popular belief, and what some dodgy search engine marketing companies want you to believe, there isn't that many search engines out there! Have you ever come across someone saying they can get you listed in thousands of search engines, and more importantly did you believe them?

There might be thousands of search engines out there, BUT it's very few search engines that actually have their own indexing spiders. Which is basically what a search engines does. They visit websites and index the content so that when someone searches for a particular keyword, volla your website pops up in SERPs (Search Engine Results pages).

The search engines that primarily have their own robots/crawlers/spiders indexing sites are: Google, Yahoo, ASK and recently MSN. These are basically the four that feeds all other search engines. When I say feed, I mean if someone does a search on another search engines the results that are shown are from one of these four search engines.

The search engine relationship

Yahoo feeds:
Primary Search Results (organic) to: Altavista and Alltheweb
Paid Results (PPC) to: Altavista and Alltheweb

Google feeds:
Primary Search Results (Organic) to: AOL & Netscape
Paid Results (PPC) to: Ask, Lycos, iWon, Hotbot, Netscape and AOL

ASK feeds:
Primary Search Results (Organic) to: Lycos, iWon & Hotbot

MSN feeds:
Primary & Paid Results to themself. MSN used to get it's paid results (PPC) from Yahoo but have recently aquired their own PPC advertising system.