7 Alternatives to Major Engines and Directories
...that could make the difference for your online profitability – by Ginette Degner

As we've seen lately, the major search engines have merged to the point where Google and Yahoo control the vast majority of searches conducted on the web. Because Yahoo now owns Inktomi, Overture, and AltaVista your options for "fresh" placement are somewhat limited.

Yes, Terra-Lycos (FAST) is still independent and MSN can't be ruled out as a force to be reckoned with especially since they've vowed to launch their own version of web-search in the not-too-distant future. But, for right now, MSN is getting their results from Inktomi and Overture (both are Yahoo properties). Oh, and LookSmart? ...since MSN nuked them as of this month, we see them as barely breathing and most likely to bite the dust in 2004. ODP, on the other hand, is still trying to dig out from a backlog of submissions rendering their directory functionally impotent.

So, we have Yahoo Business Express, Inktomi paid submit, Overture pay-per-click, and AltaVista paid submit as the "Yahoo-owned" pay-to-play options among the majors. Then we have Google's AdWords and AdSense as the other pay-to-play option.

Among the so-called free listings we have Google, Inktomi, and FAST as your basic "crawling" engines. Of course, Google deserves its legitimate claim as an engine that spiders and lists most everything on the web, minus the dups and what it internally calls the "evil" sites.

Inktomi, on the other hand, only lists "for free" those sites that have a lot of other links pointing to them – the so-called relevant sites. And, they make no guarantee that any web page that hasn't paid to be listed will stay in the index. So, it's tough to rely on a free Inktomi listing for steady traffic.

FAST (Terra-Lycos) is another engine that prefers you pay them for inclusion – but, they might list you if they feel your site is highly relevant (i.e., based on incoming link popularity). Again, one cannot count on steady traffic coming from FAST without paying to be included.

So, to say that the SE climate is ripe for the rise of alternative engines is an understatement. In many ways it seems like the same kind of fe...