Here is more, check out Google’s info … doubled their market share in just a couple of months. This was one month before they took over the secondary search results at Yahoo!.

AltaVista – Now indexing pages in less than two weeks. When submitting, make sure that AltaVista spiders your page in less than one second (listed on the confirmation page). If it takes longer, we suggest that you resubmit your page the following day.

Excite – On May 29th, we noticed that many of our clients were dropped from Excite. We suggest you check your listing in Excite and resubmit if you’re no longer listed.

Google – Has nearly doubled their market share over the last two months. Make sure you are listed with them.

Infoseek – Actively indexing pages. According to Planet Ocean, the best way to get into their index is to submit via the Go Guides.

LookSmart – Has officially discontinued their free listing service. They are being dropped by our manual listing service.

Lycos – Was just purchased by Terra Networks for $12.5 billion in stock. The new name is “Terra Lycos”.

In clearing out some Supplemental pages on our site, I ran across this. It is amazing that this was just six years ago. How the market has changed. Of the engines discussed, only Google remains (Inktomi doesn’t count).

Search Engine Update

AltaVista – Has joined the “GoTo.com” affiliate network. They display the Top 3 results from GoTo at the bottom of their search results. These results normally appear in Green with the “Sponsors Listings” title.

Excite – We have seen their spider active on many of our servers but we have seen no new pages updated in their index.

HotBot – They joined as a “GoTo.com” affiliate in November.

Google – Just posted an update and have been actively spidering sites. If you aren’t receiving the bulk of your traffic from Google, you should resubmit your pages.

Infoseek – The executives at Go.com obviously are looking for a revenue stream, but forgot that you have to have a good product before people will buy. Go actually believes it can hop on the “paid listing” wagon and charge $199 like Yahoo! and LookSmart. With less than 2% market share we advise to steer clear.

Inktomi – Has launched a “pay to be spidered” program. Terry Plank, CEO of The Academy of Web Specialists highly recommends the service as part of your overall search engine strategy.

Lycos – Joined the “GoTo.com” family in November. They are displaying GoTo listings at the top of their search results. They display under “Featured Listings”.

In doing some “Spring Cleaning” this fall on my web server, I ran across an old newsletter I wrote and quoted Danny Sullivan. Here is the search engine market share back then … August of 1999.

Northern Light: 16%
AltaVista: 15.5%
Inktomi (Snap): 15.5%
Inktomi (HotBot): 11.3%
Inktomi (MSN Search): 8.5%
Infoseek: 8.0%
Google: 7.8%
Inktomi (Yahoo): 7.4%
Excite: 5.6%
Lycos: 2.5%
Euroseek: 2.2%

My favorite is Google at 7.8%. What an infant!