Search Engine Musical Chairs
News broke recently that Yahoo has purchased the Inktomi search engine for around US$235
million. This is an interesting
development in the search engine industry that may impact
greatly on exactly where sites get their traffic from. Another
new development in the past few weeks is the change to the
HotBot service but first, I'd like to look at the ramifications
of the Yahoo/Inktomi deal.
Here's a bit of background information on how the Yahoo and
Inktomi search engines work. I'm sure everyone knows Yahoo but
not everyone may be completely aware of how their search engine works. Yahoo is a directory. This means that
it is a categorized list of sites that are listed by human editors. Getting listed in the Yahoo directory
requires a yearly payment for commercial sites.
You can get listed for free if you have a non-commercial
site but it is very hard to do and can take months. Yahoo
provides additional results when you use their search function
that come from Google. In the past, Yahoo has used other search
engines to provide these results (including Inktomi) but has
used Google for the last couple of years.
They initially used results from other search engines to just
compliment their own. So, if someone searched for something that wasn't in their directory, they could still
get results. The way it worked was that they would provide results from their own
directory first and then a user would click on "web pages" to
get more results.
Strangely, Yahoo actually changed the way this worked during the year so that the results from
a search were a mix of listings from their own directory and Google with the Google results being the
more prominent of the two. This has essentially made the payment of the US$299 per year for a directory
listing an unnecessary expense. Many people still use the directory to browse for sites but, in my
experience, more people use the search function.
Inktomi is a full crawler based search engine that provides
results for other search engines. They do have a web site but
no-one uses it to actually search - it's more of an
informational site. Inktomi's results formerly appeared in many
search engines but in the last few years, their popularity has
declined. The main site that currently uses Inktomi is MSN but
Inktomi only provides the fifth level of results. MSN provides
sponsored listings from Overture, their own Microsoft sites,
their own human edited directory results, LookSmart listings and
then Inktomi. So, Inktomi does drive traffic to sites but far
less than a search engine like Google.
So, what does all this mean to us? It's hard to say at the
moment but there are three options. Either nothing will change
(which is unlikely), Yahoo will use Inktomi together with Google
on it's site or it will dump Google and use Inktomi for it's
search results. Yahoo actually owns part of Google, maybe 5%, so
there is a chance that they will keep using their results for
this reason. Also, Google provide far better results for
searchers than Inktomi so Yahoo would be making a mistake to
replace Google. But, apparently Yahoo is annoyed that Google has
become competition to them through Google's own site and that
Google's news search service is also providing competition.
Without a crystal ball, it's very difficult to know what is
going to happen but it's worth making sure that you are prepared for all occurrences. There is really very little that you need
to do because it is only the popularity of Inktomi that may
change. Even without the searches from Yahoo, Google will still
be the biggest search engine in the world due to the fact that
it's own site is very popular and it's results are also used by
AOL (amongst others). So, what can you do to get the most from
Inktomi?
Inktomi is the only major search engine that uses meta tags.
This is actually the reason that it is not as popular as before
because meta tags allow webmasters to "trick" Inktomi into
thinking a page has more relevant content than there really is.
Therefore, Inktomi's search results are not very good.
However,
as there is a good chance that Inktomi will now become popular
again, you need to make sure that you have your meta keyword and
meta description tags in place. Make sure they are relevant to
the page that they are on - you don't want to be caught
"spamming" their search engine. The other thing that will
probably make a difference is to get other sites to link to you.
Link popularity makes a difference on all search engines except
possibly AllTheWeb.
I'll keep you updated here with any news on what Yahoo decides
to do and any changes that I find out about the way the Inktomi
generates results.
As I mentioned above, the other major search engine news in the
last month is that HotBot has finally updated their site. HotBot
is owned by Lycos and was quite a popular search engine a few
years ago. It has become far less popular lately - since it was
purchased by Lycos and was just left to "die". It's results
largely came from a mix of the ODP, DirectHit and Inktomi.
DirectHit has since become Teoma which is owned by AskJeeves but
HotBot went for months after DirectHit ceased to exist saying
that it's results were coming from them.
So, HotBot has essentially become another meta search engine -
like DogPile or Excite. It now works pretty much like Netscape
does. A searcher can choose which search engine they would like
their results to come from. The search engines that you can
choose from are Fast (AllTheWeb), Google, Inktomi and Teoma.
This may mean that HotBot starts to get some of it's market
share back but as webmasters, there is nothing that we can do to
target HotBot. All we can do is target the search engines which
provide it's results.
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Sean Burns is the author of Search Engine Rankings Revealed. This eBook
provides a step by step guide to helping the search engines send
you traffic. His sites received almost 1 million highly targeted
visitors from search engines last year. Rankings Revealed will
show you how to do it
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