7 Search Engines That You Can’t Afford to Miss
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.
Tips For Successful PPC Campaigns
When starting the promotion a website through a pay per click search site, it is vital to take under consideration a few important aspects. Concentrating to the next points will not just raise one’s conversion rate, but it will also reduce the advertiser’s's chances of spending one’s cash as a result of fake clicking. There is a professional PPC resource that makes the process easy: PPC Loophole
1.Title and description:
When selecting the title and description for one’s advertisement, you has to take special care to insert factual, attention grasping information about one ‘s service or product. For example, if you are marketing an online casino directory, then one may think about using a circumstantial title like ‘Online Casino’ vs the title ‘Gambling’ which is too large and general. An example of a circumstantial and attention grabbing description might be ‘Receive 0+ in free casino bonuses’ vs a broad description like ‘Directory of web casinos’. Which title and outline would you be rather more likely to click on? ‘Online Casinos : list of net casinos’ or ‘Online Casinos : Receive 0 in free casino bonuses’?
2.Keywords
Select applicable keywords that accurately describe the product or service that you are promoting. Given adequate time and means, a marketer can actually generate a multitude of related keywords for any subject. However , employing a great list of keywords isn’t suggested for the reason that in most cases only a small fraction of these keywords are relevant while the vast larger part of the keywords are not, and would only help to drain the marketer’s money. For example, while the subsequent keywords may accurately define a web casino directory ‘online casino, online casinos, online casino directory’, other keywords such as ‘gambling, poker chips, Las Vegas’ are too general, too vague and usually unimportant to the topic of interest.
3.Search Result Rankings
The 1st set of positions in search engine results will often entice the most amount of traffic. Granting this is advantageous for the one marketer whose results arise in the 1st set of search leads to Google, Yahoo, Bing and other free search engines, it might not be the case for people whose search results show up in the leading positions of PPC search engine results. Most PPC search engines have affiliate marketing programs which offer webmasters inducements to push them, and the more people an affiliate web designer can get to click on the paid lists, the additional money he/she earns. While many pay-per-click search engines have anti-fraud mechanisms in place to attenuate the danger of an advertiser wasting his/her funds as a result of fake clicking, some PPC search engines may not. For this reason, it isn’t invariably recommended to bid for the first three search result positions of a PPC search website only if the pay per click search site has a very powerful anti-fraud application to defend the PPC marketer from fraudulent activity.
4.Digging into the pay-per-click search website:
Prior to creating an account with any pay-per-click search website, it’s a smart move to read as many analysis about the search website as possible. Most especially, read about the practice of folks who have used it previously. Has it got good customer service? What anti-fraud measures does it employ? What is it’s Alexa.com rank? Who else is advertising on it? Are there any super affiliates advertising on it? How do the bid amounts of the pay per click search engine stack up against to the bid amounts of other pay-per-click search engnes? These will sometimes give you a clue of whether to use it or not.
5.Monitoring Sales:
Depending on the product being promoted, there are several paths to track the result of an advertising campaign. If you’re the webmaster of a specific website which has it’s own affiliate marketing programme, then you may wish to consider setting up a completely unique associate account for each PPC search site that you decide to use. As an example, you may set up an affiliate account for pay per click search website xyz and call the associate account xyz. Then you can track the efficacy of search website xyz by recording the effectiveness of affiliate account xyz. Some affiliate marketing programmes permit advertisers to line up unique advertising campaigns with unique linking codes, landers, for example. These are also excellent for monitoring the effectiveness of PPC search engines.
Tracking Traffic:
One mean of tracking the traffic received from pay per click search engines would be to allocate a completely unique entry point for each pay per click search engine and to monitor the stats of that entry point. Another method of tracking the traffic received from pay-per-click search engines could be to add the tag ?Name-of-PPC-search-Engine at the end of the url being marjeted on the pay-per-click search engine. This would function to inform the advertiser as to which PPC search website sent a selected visitor. The only way to monitor the traffic received from a PPC search site is to add an full-scale probabilistic tracker to an internet site to monitor precisely where the traffic is coming from. It is very important to keep a close eye on where your traffic is coming from because if there is any fake activity going on, you’d need to stop it before your marketing funds expire. For example, if a pay per click search site affiliate has posted a link back to your service/product with tricking words to inspire his visitors to click on your listing, then you’d want to understand about it before your promotion money are finished due to fraudulent clicking.
6.Track Bids:
It is crucial to observe the bids for the keywords selected on a consistent basis. Bid amounts continually change as advertising accounts get closed and new advertising accounts open, etc. As an example, if you’re paying $0.24 per click to be in the third position of the search results for a selected keyword, but position number four is only bidding $0.04 per click, then you are wasting $0.20 per click because you would only need to bid $0.05 per click to be in the 3rd position of the search results.
Additional resources:
7 Free Search Engine Optimization and Writing Tools
There are some very simple things that you can do to optimize your site. If you want to get more from your website, then implement these strategies, use these tools, and make your website spider food for the search engines.Below are some of the best sites I have found for optimizing my sites.
1. Check your site.
The truth is, you want to optimize your site for Google, which is now the number one search engine in the world.
2. Toolkits
If you can find the tools you need in a collection, this will save you a lot of time, as well as frustration because you will know exactly what you need to do to properly optimize your site.
3. SEO Software
You can also use software to help you optimize your site. Where software will help you the most is to actually help you optimize your site for the keywords you are trying to target. It’s a waste of time to optimize your site if you haven’t optimized for the right keywords.
4. ROR Generator/Robots Text Generator
You can use this generator to create an ROR file for your site, and then paste a button to the main page of your website. When the search engines spider your site, they'll spider this file and have a better description of what your site is about.
5. Site Map
A site map is not only a great tool for letting your customers know where everything is located on your site, it can also help you with the search engines.
By creating a site map, you will have an index of all the pages on your website.
6. XML Site Generator
An XML sitemap is a search engine friendly sitemap of your site. This isn’t written for your visitors though. It's written for the search engines so that they can find all of the pages on your website.
7. Linking
The more links you have pointing back to your site, the higher the page rank you will get, as well as creating a way for others to find you. You can use this strategy to get referrals from other sites, which is free traffic. It’s targeted, and you are being recommended by another site.
The author is an SEO consultant and woks on web promotion and affordable web hosting.
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