In today’s age search engines are massive corporations with extremely complex ownerships and partnerships. Each search engine applies its own theories on the business, some are more technology orientated whilst others prefer to focus on commercial aspects such as selling ad space and creating new sponsorships. However as an SEO it is important to know which of these massive corporations own each other and which ones feed the other information or SERPs. Knowing this will help in highlighting which search engines to target with your search engine optimization efforts.
Not that long ago search engine companies were pretty even each taking a very similar share of the market and all using very similar technology. Then a large period of incorporation occurred and some of the larger companies began to partner and even buy out the smaller companies. This has left us with 3 massive search engines also known as Yahoo!, Google and Live search. These massive corporations deal with 95 per cent of all searchers done online, worldwide.
It is important to be clear about where each of these massive search engines feed results to as you will then be able to see just how many search engines you can reach by optimising for one of the main search engines.
Yahoo! is one of the biggest search engines online and owns Lycos, AllTheWeb and Altavista. It also uses Inktomi technology for all its subsidiary companies to provide efficient search results. Yahoo has a massive search data base and provides search results for more people on a daily basis than any other search engine.
Google is well known for it’s excellent technology and as well as partnering with AOL it also provides search results for Netscape, Ask and Iwon. Google also owns the most popular advertising platform on the net known as AdWords and AdSense. Google searchers are not as many as Yahoo however Google are linked more with business and commercial searchers therefore their traffic tends to be more profitable.
Live search doe’s not own any other companies but it does however provide it’s ow