There are two ways we can rank search engines. The first, is in terms of Popularity; number of people that are using search engines to find products, services and information. The second, and perhaps most important factor from a marketing point of view, is Audience Reach; number of search portals that a Search Engine is showing its results through each day, thereby reaching maximum number of people.

First, lets look at Popularity. The following search engine popularity figures were compiled by Neilson/NetRatings, a provider of digital audience information and analysis. This company monitors over 225,000 individuals in 26 countries to gather its Internet usage results.

In October 2002, Search Engine Popularity in U.S. was as follows:

Google 29.2% Yahoo 28.5% MSN 28.1% AOL 19.7% Ask Jeeves 10.3% Netscape 5.5% Overture 5.4% InfoSpace 5.1% AltaVista 4.4% Lycos 4.4% LookSmart 3.0% Earthlink 1.8%

(source: Search Engine Watch)

These figures tell us a lot about search engine usage; where people are going to find their information. But what they don’t tell us are more important facts about how widespread each search engine’s listings are across Internet as a whole.

Let’s look at this from a marketing perspective. Most major search engines have agreements in place with each other and with different search portals to display their results. This means that their Audience Reach is actually much larger or smaller than Neilson/NetRatings results suggest.

Although actual figures are hard to determine, here’s how search engines rank from perspective of Audience Reach:

1. Google Every web user, in every country, has access to Google’s search results. As well as providing results via its own search pages, Google supplies search results to Yahoo, AOL, Ask Jeeves, Netscape, EarthLink and AT&T. Search services InfoSpace, IWON and Simpatico.ca (Canada) also display their listings. A high ranking listing at Google will return an enormous amount of targeted traffic to your site because of its wide audience reach through partner search sites.

2. Overture (formally GoTo.com) Overture is a pay-per-click search engine. Its audience reach is also extremely wide. Overture’s top three search results are displayed as premier listings on Altavista, MSN, Lycos, AllTheWeb(aka FAST), Excite and Go.com. Its results are also displayed on hundreds of smaller search portals. If your goal is to gain maximum exposure within a few days and you are prepared to pay for it, Overture will deliver maximum audience reach.

Benefits:

* Upon submission, your pages will make it into AltaVista index within 2 business days.

* Your pages are respidered every 24 hours.

* The term of pay inclusion program is 6 months.

* Reporting services are included, such as tracking submissions and transactions through their online Account Management Center.

* The audience reach of AltaVista, according to Nielsen NetRatings in October 2002, was: AltaVista: 4.4% . Source: (http://www.searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html)

* Cost? $39 for first URL, and $29 each for 2-10 URL's, then $19 each for 11 to 500 URLs. So, total cost for our three pages for **six months** would be $97. The cost per year would be $194.

Downside:

AltaVista's pay inclusion is more expensive than others, and AV doesn't have coverage that some of other engines have. Plus, their pay inclusion program is only for six months, as compared to a full year with other programs.

So, you'll have to decide whether you feel it's worth cost.

AltaVista is one engine where you can still use their free add URL without being placed into same category as huge group of "free add URL spammers," because AltaVista's free add URL process doesn't allow mass submissions. Instead, their unique "puzzle submission" process requires you to enter a submission code into submission box, and you can only submit five URLs at no cost. So, if you want to use free add URL for one of engines, AltaVista's is one to use. http://addurl.altavista.com/addurl/new

Total Costs So Far

With our example, considering that this is a brand new Web site with zero visibility, we'll figure out cost for our three pages based on using AltaVista's pay inclusion program and on not using their program.

Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs Without AltaVista: $221 (for 3 pages) (Includes Inktomi engines, Fast engines, Teoma, and Ask Jeeves. This does NOT include AltaVista.)

Subtotal of Yearly Pay Inclusion Costs With AltaVista: $415 (for 3 pages) (Includes Inktomi engines, Fast engines, Teoma, Ask Jeeves, and AltaVista.)

Yahoo! http://www.yahoo.com