Review the Google Search Engine
There is no doubt that Google (www.google.com) is the largest search engine, and its page rank algorithm formed the basic rules for early known search engine optimization. It was the first to rank indexed pages based on multiple factors and display these indexed pages based on their Google ranking. Google has an enormous number of servers located in countries worldwide, and having your website indexed by Google can help your website receive a lot of organic traffic. That said, many SEO techniques target putting websites at the top of Google rankings so they will appear at the top-most search position in the search results page, which is known as Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
Review the Yahoo Search Engine
Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) has its own web crawler (Yahoo Slurp) and it uses different indexing capabilities to index your blog or website. While Google focuses more on the concept of the search term and how users use different combinations of keywords, Yahoo focuses on the search keywords itself. Also, it places a lot of attention on the page title and Metadata. Understanding how the Yahoo search algorithm works will help you optimize your website or blog for Yahoo search. Also, Yahoo has its own paid directory, (http://dir.yahoo.com/), where you can submit your blog or website for indexing. Yahoo is now powered by Bing.
Review the Bing Search Engine
Bing (www.bing.com) is a popular Microsoft search engine. It is based on its predecessors, MSN and Live Search, which were old Microsoft search engines. The Bing algorithm places a greater focus on the web page title and description Metadata, similar to Yahoo. However, Bing has a better way to process queries and search terms than Yahoo. While major search engines take into account the authority of a link and the length of time a blog or website has existed on the web, Bing is not restricted in this way. This is helpful to remember if you are building a new website, because Bing can index your website much more easily than Google, which puts the website domain name age as one of the important factors when indexing links and considering it trustworthy.
Review the AOL Search Engine
AOL (www.aol.com) is an old search engine. While AOL currently depends on Google to enhance the search results for those using AOL as their web searching tool, it depends on its own listing or external web links to display the search results. When you use AOL, you will notice that it provides both horizontal and vertical search as well as free search results and paid search results, which are promoted links that meet with your search criteria.
Review the Ask Search Engine
Ask (www.ask.com) is an old search engine with a different method of organizing a search. Ask groups the search results in a vertical search that can help the user narrow the search results. Ask is also a question and answer platform and allows users to ask questions and find answers from its own database. At this time, Ask is most focused on the Q&A search, which you will notice when you do a search on the Ask website. The results appear in the form of answers to your questions. While this may not affect your search engine optimization process, it can still drive traffic to your blog or website if your content has been indexed by the Ask search engine.
