March 16th, 2010 by Nick

Most SEO chatter and the majority of SEO research focuses on Google, and with good reason. They are by far the biggest, smartest, and have the lion’s share of the search market (it could be as high as 90% in the UK). However, that still leaves hundreds of millions of searches to the other engines. Today we’re going to have a look at the different engines and how they relate to you search engine optimisation strategy.

Next in line is Yahoo! search. Like Google, Yahoo are a massive company with fingers in a lot of the internet’s pies. For search engine optimization purposes, the most important of Yahoo’s pieces is their directory service, which is one of the largest and most important around. The search actually grew out of that directory, although the two are not so closely linked now. Let’s concentrate on the search functionality.

More experienced web users might remember Inktomi and Altavista, which both ended up being bought by Yahoo and integrated into its search services. Like Google, not all the search results will be html. PDF and word documents, PowerPoint presentations, and various feeds may also turn up- something to remember when building an SEO strategy. The main difference between the two top search engines is that while Google give a little extra ranking help to informational sites, Yahoo! search is thought to be more geared towards retailers and commercial websites. It also places more emphasis on its shopping-specific search service than Google does.

Bing is a new face on the search engine scene. As a Microsoft product, you’d expect it to have some fairly powerful backing and a very sophisticated algorithmic basis. It’s only been around in this current incarnation since June 2009, but it is an evolution of MSN search and Microsoft’s Live Search, so the jump from 0 to a 3% or greater search market share in 8 months isn’t so shocking.

Microsoft and Yahoo recently signed an agreement that’ll lead to Bing fully powering Yahoo search, although they will remain as separate entities. It is worth watching both to see what changes in the search engine market appear as a result.

After Bing, the few percentage points of market share left go to Ask.com, AOL, and a few minor search engines. Instead of discussing the various points of difference between them, the thing to note for SEO is that one search engine takes upwards of 75 to 80% of the global market, and the top three account for almost all of it. Not so long ago, there were a dozen major search engines and no real dominant force. The one that’s winning the battle is the one with the strongest algorithms- Google.

One of the main reasons so many engines died out (although some were bought and aggregated) is that unethical SEO flooded their results with rubbish and spam. Google succeeded because it found a way to differentiate between good websites and poor websites. Real search engine optimsation will only flow from building quality into your website.

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