The Top 100 Alternative Search Engines

Written by Charles S. Knight, SEO, and edited by Richard MacManus. The Top 100 is listed at the end of the analysis.

Ask anyone which search engine they use to find information on the Internet and they will almost certainly reply: “Google.” Look a little further, and market research shows that people actually use four main search engines for 99.99% of their searches: Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com (in that order). But in my travels as a Search Engine Optimizer (SEO), I have discovered that in that .01% lies a vast multitude of the most innovative and creative search engines you have never seen. So many, in fact, that I have had to limit my list of the very best ones to a mere 100.

But it’s not just the sheer number of them that makes them worthy of attention; each one of these search engines has that standard “About Us” link at the bottom of the homepage. I call it the “why we’re better than Google” page. And after reading dozens and dozens of these pages, I have come to the conclusion that, taken as a whole, they are right!

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The same way you clean up your house before your guests arrive, the same way you should get your website ready for Google’s crawler, as this is one of the most important guests you will ever have. According to that, here are 10 things you should double check before submitting your website to the index. If you want, you can view this article as the correction of the top 10 mistakes made by webmasters.

1. If you have a splash page on your website, make sure you have a text link that allows you to pass it.
I’ve seen many websites with a fancy flash introduction on the index and no other way to navigate around it. Well, Google can’t read into your flash page, and therefore it cannot bypass it. All you have to do is put a text link to your website’s second index, and the deed is done.

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Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager Update—available as part of Microsoft Office Small Business Edition 2003 and Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003—is designed to help small businesses manage customer information and sales opportunities within Outlook 2003. The update includes new capabilities for sharing customer information within a PC network, as well as support for synchronizing business contacts with a Microsoft Windows Mobile–based Pocket PC.

get the update here: http://www.microsoft.com/office/outlook/contactmanager/prodinfo/update.mspx

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Hosting

A website is made up of one or more computer files for each web page. These files are stored on computers called hosts, that are directly connected to the internet. Generally hosts operate continuously and are constantly monitored for proper operation. Whenever someone wants to see one of your web pages, the request is sent to your host, which transmits the necessary files to the requestor. If your host is not operating, nobody can see your web pages.

Site Names

Host computers on the internet are identified by long strings of decimal digits which are decidedly unfriendly to remember. As such, part of the internet mechanisms allow names that people can remember, such as www.coke.com, or www.whitehouse.gov, or www.amazon.com. Domains / site names are registered at places like godaddy.com, register.com and networksolutions.com.

There are special computers on the internet known as name servers (domain name servers – DNS), whose sole purpose is to provide the translation from these more user friendly names to the decimal identification of the corresponding host computer.

This translation mechanism has additional advantages. It allows a website to move from one computer to another, simply by changing the information tables in the name servers. Perhaps one computer is being overloaded, or physically replaced, or you found another hosting service that is cheaper or more reliable. The internet naming methods gives you the equivalent of one address for life.

Of course, there must be some method to make sure that the names that the assigned names are unique, and that changes are distributed to all the name servers together. This is the role of corporations called Internet Registrars, and they charge between ten and thirty-five dollars per year to maintain each unique name.

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