Google is rapidly gaining market share among search sites and could surpass long-time leader Yahoo if the trend continues. Google has agreements with both Yahoo and Netscape to provide better back-end search capability for visitors conducting searches on their sites. Google's back-end service is not included in these figures; only visitors that search directly from Google's site are included in Google's usage share.

Yahoo's use of Google's search capabilities seems to have increased Google' s visibility. That's because the Google search engine powers the Yahoo Web Page Results. Google hasa tie up with AOL as well to provide editorial search results and paid listings to AOL's various search properties in the United States, including AOL Search, Netscape Search and CompuServe Search.

Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO) is still the top referring search engine in 100 countries, including the United States. Although it operates only two dozen country specific sites, Yahoo! ranked as the top search referrer in almost every major country in the world, according to StatMarket. Search referrals are the visits that a search engine refers or directs to other sites.

Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ: MSFT) MSN has quietly risen to become one of the top referring search sites on the Web. Among U.S. surfers, MSN is now the third-ranked search site behind Yahoo and Google. MSN currently uses a mixture of results from other search engines and directories, as well as paid listings from their own listings. MSN, Inktomi, Looksmart, and Overture results are all currently used for MSN search results.

AOL and its affiliated Web sites are one of the most trafficked locations, drawing 91.9 million visitors, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, March 2002 report. AOL Search allows its members to search across the web and AOL's own content from one place. The main listings for categories and web sites come from the Open Directory. Inktomi also provides crawler-based results, as backup to the directory information. According to a press release on May 1, 2002, Google has been selected by AOL to provide editorial search results and paid listings to AOL's various search properties in the United States, including AOL Search, Netscape Search and CompuServe Search. America Online Inc.'s decision to hire search engine leader 'Google' to help its 34 million members find their way around the Web provided another reminder of Google's rising popularity.

Ask Jeeves is a human-powered search service that aims to direct you to the exact page that answers your question. Ask Jeeves also owns Teoma (formerly called Direct Hit). Teoma results are currently offered via the Teoma website and integrated into results at Ask Jeeves.




AllTheWeb.com (also known as FAST Search) launched in May 1999 has one of the largest indexes of the web. The site, also known as AllTheWeb.com, is a showcase for FAST's search technologies. FAST's results are provided to numerous portals, including those run by Terra Lycos

Solely a Pay Per Click search engine, with Overture you choose keywords/ phrases that you want your site to appear under and try to outbid the competition for a top billing. The higher you bid, the higher your URL on the search results page. They recently lost the contract to supply sponsored links to AOL Search, but they do still provide search results for AOL's Europe Net properties in the UK, France and Germany.

Looksmart (http://www.looksmart.com)

LookSmart previously allowed websites to be included in its commercial listings by paying a one-time review fee, through its "Basic Submit" and "Express Submit" submission programs. These have now been eliminated, replaced in April 2002 by a new cost-per-click "LookListings Small Business" program.




AltaVista, founded in 1995 is one of the oldest crawler-based search engines on the web. It has a large index of web pages and a wide range of power searching commands. It also offers news search, shopping search and multimedia search. Currently, it reaches over 45 million visitors worldwide.




Lycos started out as a search engine, depending on listings that came from spidering the web. In April 1999, it shifted to a directory model similar to Yahoo. Some of their listings come from the ODP, Fast Search/AllTheWeb with sponsored listings shown at the top of the search results pages coming from Overture.com.



HotBot launched in May 1996 as Wired Digital's entry into the search engine market. In October 1998, Lycos acquired the competing HotBot search service, which continues to be run separately. In most cases, HotBot's first page of results comes from the Direct Hit service (Now renamed as “Teoma”) and then secondary results come from the Inktomi search engine, which is also used by other services. It gets its directory information from the Open Directory project.



Provides results to many engines and directories such as Iwon, MSN, Hotbot, and more. The benefit of listing with Inktomi is the exposure your site will receive with its search partners.




Netscape Search's results come primarily from the Open Directory and Netscape's own "Smart Browsing" database, which does an excellent job of listing "official" websites. Secondary results come from Google. At the Netscape Netcenter portal site, other search engines are also featured.




Also known as DMOZ, the ODP is hosted and administered by Netscape Communication Corp. All submissions are reviewed by human editors before being added to the directory and each category has what is called an "ODP Editor" who is responsible for that category. DMOZ provides results to many search partners, such as All The Web, HotBot, Google, Lycos, Altavista, etc.