April 24th, 2010 by Nick

When looking at your search engine optimization techniques there is no doubt that your research and rankings will be based around a handful of the most popular search engines. Google is of course the leader in the search engine world, with Bing, Yahoo and Ask following closely behind. Yahoo used to be one of the favourites, yet Google somehow flew past them to the number one spot almost overnight. Bing has a large user base due to its loyal customers from the MSN Windows Live days and it also benefits from the fact that it is part of MSN, so people using the site for other information are more inclined to search using Bing.

Ask appears to have held its own, too. After dropping the gimmicky Jeeves reference and offering us a simple question and answer search, its success and effectiveness has somehow been sustained. Then there is the likes of YouYube, which you are highly likely to consider in any SEO if you are tagging video content, or are using YouTube as a host for your video links.

Arguably, these are the most popular search engines around. However, if you are looking more in depth into the effectiveness of your search engine optimisation, should you be considering any other search engine sites?  The short answer is yes, but the more comprehensive answer is that it is not feasible or possible to cover off every eventuality.

If you are considering trends and up-to-the-minute searches, there are quite a lot of people who choose to use search engines for search engines. Sites such as Dogpile might not be particularly well known, but the benefits of sites such as these is you can cover of the four major search engines in just one search, which definitely makes it worth a thought when measuring your search engine rankings.

For comtemporary social trends, one site which should not be underestimated is Oneriot.com. This site offers its users the most up to date and fresh content, whether it is discussion forums, blogs or news feeds, and is a true real time search engine.

It is also worth considering specialised search engines for different types of links or tags to your website. We are already familiar with YouTube for video posts, but if you are running links to images then look at sites such as Imprezzeo.com, which focuses predominantly on image searches. Whilst initial thoughts may be that this is wasteful, let us remember that YouTube is based on video posts only and is one of the largest search sites today.

If you want to go retro, think back to your first days as a web user and you will find that a lot of the original search engines we knew and loved are still going. Lycos, Netscape and Go for instance, all still exist as it is unlikely that these search engines will ever be removed. They may just be worth a look now and again for SEO potential.

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