7 Search Engines That You Can’t Afford to Miss

December 22, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Search Engine Marketing 

Lets face it, Google is the leading search engine, and will likely continue to be that for a long time, there is thousands of alternative search engines that are working hard to gain a part of the search market for themselves.

{The English language market for search is dominated by a few big behemoths. According to a report by comScore the market for search in October 2009 was dominated by Google (65.4%), Yahoo (18.0%), Microsoft (9.9%), Ask (3.9%) and AOL (2.9%), MapQuest, eBay, craigslist, Fox, MySpace, Facebook and Amazon.}

Still with each 1% slice of the search market having a value of Billion at yearly revenues of 2 million there is no need to conquer more than 0.1% percent of the market to make serious money. That’s why we’ll continue to see an increasing number of start up search engines.

This is the top 7 search engines that the 2010 news stories are likely to gossip about. Not all of them are brand new, some are, but all have in common that they have been innovating in 2009 and they deliver good search results.

Cuil

With two ex Googlers, Anna Patterson and Russell Power, in the management team and by claiming to be the worlds biggest search engine Cuil has a lot to deliver.

Overloaded servers that generated low quality search results hampered the initial 2008 launch giving Cuil a fair amount of negative media attention but of you try it out today you’ll find the search results are really good and there is an explore by category function that is among the best I’ve seen.

DuckDuckGo

The search engine with the silly name and a cute interface combines Yahoo BOSS, Wikipedia and it’s own crawler DuckDuckBot to deliver both hard information in a Zero-click info box, categories to further refine searches and the actual search results.

Founded by Gabriel Weinberg, who started and then sold The Names Database, DuckDuckGo is a private venture and has grown steadily since it’s launch in September 2008. I think this search engine has a clear niche carved out for itself, watch out for this search engine in 2010

Spezify

This search engine is just totally awesome. The search results are rendered as images and newspaper clippings spread out on the computer screen, the clippings being made of one paragraph excerpts from the result web site. By scanning some of the clippings you get a good overview of the theme you are researching and can make an educated decision on which search results to click on and read more about.

It’s also a great brainstorming tool. Just type in a theme and you’ll get a ton of ideas for a new article or blog post.

Secret Search Engine Labs

This is a search engine that does not aim to rank sites the same way as the big three, G-Y-B. There is many new and small-scale websites that has difficulty getting a good rank in the Google search results as the giant has a notorious preference for old, established authority sites. The algorithm used by Secret Search Engine Labs ranks web pages according to on page keywords and link anchor keywords and removes junk pages using the trademarked CashRank method.

Secret Search Engine Labs was initiated in 2007 by Simon Byholm, a software engineer and entrepreneur from Finland, and in addition to relevant and different search results it aims to provide tools and info for webmasters on how webpages are ranked.

Bing

First there was MSN Search, then Live Search and right now with the latest re-branding we have Bing. These days Microsoft has managed to grab almost 10% of the market share for web search by running a bold marketing campaign. As part of the relaunch there has been a decent amount of new functionality, like related categories using the know how from the search engine Powerset that Microsoft acquired in 2008.

Watch Bing closely in 2010 as Microsoft has finally taken some real action to grow their market share and it’s likely that you will see more changes over time.

Blekko

With a management team with backgrounds Topix, Google, AOL and Netscape Search this start-up search engine is as secretive as Google about what they will do next and when.

At the time of writing in early December 2009 they have still not opened to the public but with the launch scheduled for the end of 2009 this search engine will make big news in 2010. Let’s hope it’s exiting news.

Monitter

This is a real-time Twitter monitor with reply and re-tweet options. You fill in three keywords and after some processing the latest Twitter posts containing your keywords start rolling down the screen in three separate columns. Really neat for keeping an eye on your area of expertise and joining in the conversation.

What About The Rest?

Chances are you already know that Google is innovating and there is no doubt they will make it into the news in 2010. Wolfram Alpha is fascinating as it is the only major search engine to make it’s search results from data.

In addition to my list of seven there is also a multitude of new social and real-time search engines coming and there’s no way to know if one of them will become a permanent player in the search market. You will find more information about these in the big list of search engines maintained by Secret Search Engine Labs, in this search engine list on Hubpages or on AltSearchEngines.com a blog that lists just about every new search engine launched.

After many years of Google – Yahoo – Microsoft rule there is now signs of radical changes in the search landscape. There’s so much new technology out there. New search engines using social networks, visual presentation, new semantic algorithms and real-time results to stand out from the crown are appearing everywhere. The result, even if we get no new top three, is that the ruling dinosaurs will have to keep innovating to keep up with the crowd and in the end we’ll get a better search experience.

Pay Per Click Information – The Basics

December 21, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: PPC 

If you are new to web marketing, you’ll have not yet been introduced to pay per click or pay-per-click advertising. But this type of advertising is one of the most powerful and often talked about on Internet marketing blog sites, to promote your products, build your lead list and make sales. This article offers basic pay per click information for the newb.  

What is Pay Per Click?

Pay-per-click ads (commonly known as pay per click adverts) are text adverts that you place on a search website like Google, Yahoo or MSN. You construct the ad according to the criteria and guidelines of whatever search site you are using and you bid the amount you are willing to pay everytime a person clicks on your ad. The more you bid, the higher your ad will appear in the search engine results.

How do you construct a pay per click ad?

Although they’re similar, each search website has its own platform and set of instructions to help you develop your advertisements. But one thing that is common and critical to your understanding of PPC information is the tenet of keywords. You need to base your ad on what people are essentially typing in when they perform a search on the web. How does one know what they are typing in? The search engine will be able to offer this information to you when you create your ad. So, if you need to advertise coffee mugs for instance, you will be able to type these words into your pay per click keyword tool and see what related words folk are actually searching for and how often they are on the lookout for them. You will use these words in your announcement.

Once your ad is finished, anytime somebody types in the words “coffee mugs” or whatever related terms you have specified in your advertisements, your advertisement will appear on the search engine page. Where it seems depends on how much you have bid for the keyword in comparison with how much your competitors have bid. Google, Yahoo and MSN all offer you the possibility to see where your ad will be placed depending on the bid you make. You can change your bid to move your ranking up or down.

When only starting out, it’s a great idea to concentrate on low-search volume keywords so you won’t have too much competition and your bids can still be low to get your ad ranked relatively high on the page. It’ll take you longer to get some traffic to whatever it is that you are promoting but you’ll need to go this route till you start making enough money to be able to battle with the higher-search volume keywords. One of the biggest mistakes folks make when starting with pay per click is to go with the most commonly searched and most competitive keywords. This is a certain way to spend a lot of money and possibly not get the results that you are targeting for.

Hopefully this pay per click info has been beneficial – pay per click is a highly effective form of advertising if you understand how to do it the right way.

What is Pay Per Click Promoting?

December 21, 2009 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: PPC 

Pay-per-click marketing is one of the most widely used forms of paying for advertising there’s online today. The technique of charging you, the marketer, has been most typically credited to Bill Gross. This strategy was first introduced into the Net world in 1998. It’s also one of the preferred on the web today. It does have many flaws but also many advantages . Understanding pay per click can help you avoid falling into the downsides of pay-per-click advertising.  

The main basic idea of pay-per-click is that people like you get links on search engines or on sites that employ search engines ad, such as blogs for one example, you can monitor and analyse them with GC Detective 3.0. You only pay for your ad when a visitor clicks on your link. The fees that you’ll pay for this kind of marketing sometimes vary significantly. When thinking about the cost the search website terms that are used more often tend to cost more than the keywords that are less frequently used.

You may be more familiar with the more common pay for click advertising that appears with Google. What you are likely not conscious of is that a lot of other search engines have a program similar to this for their commercial clients. There are generally two different ways you can have your advertising ad appear on the search engines. The first one is commonly known as the sponsored matched PPC advertising. In this program ads appear in the search engine pages. When a potential visitor searches for a certain keyword and your ad is related to that topic, then it most usually will pop up off to the side of the search website.

The other form of pay-per-click selling is called content match. When certain people create sites that contain private content they have the power to choose to take part in programs which will let them run advertisements on their personal pages. Most often they’re also reimbursed for advertising the pay-per-click site as well . This is most typically though just a little percentage of what the first advertising site owner makes. This profit can be anywhere from a few cents to a couple of dollars depending on the contract terms. This is a way for a personal site owner to gain traffic to their site because visitors will most often click their link to try the advertising.

If you have decided that PPC might work great for you will be capable of finding a selection of different companies on the search engines. You should take considerable time to research which company will most closely match your PPC selling needs .

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