What search engine do you use most?

black-saturn

I wondered what search engines people use the most and which ones are the best to submit my site to? With the last website I built I used a search engine submission programme but then ended up with LOADS of spam. Anyone got any tips?

All useful posts will be thanked :j :j :j

Seraphim

I use Yahoo/Google most of the time. Definitely worth submitting to MSN as well though. It's a good idea to have a sitemap and ping Google and Yahoo as then the bots know the pages that they need to crawl. I believe MSN aren't using the Sitemaps standard yet (??) but should be soon?

Astaroth

Google is by far the most commonly used search engine.

Unfortunately spam is something that you will always get, as a business it is much higher risk to have spam filters and junk mail etc setup in case they filter important customer communications.

Generally there are few things you can do to prevent it.... assuming you have a catch all mailbox you can use a different email for each website you submit it to so that you can identify who they originate from (eg when registering for here use moneysavingexpert@mydomain.com and then for google google@mydomain.com)

Dont have any links to your email address on your website as there are harvesting programs that can crawl them to create lists - use a form with the email address coded into the back end program rather than in a hidden field on the form. Of cause this will annoy some like me who prefer to email than filling in a form

nutmegman

Google is the one for me, for ease of use etc........

Might be hard to get your site high up though, depends on what you are selling there are loads of comparision sites...etc.

ukbill69

Not sure of the % of people that use google but its high, like 90% I think. Me included.

Savvy_Sue

I try to remember to use Everyclick at work but don't always find what I want that way, so back to Google for me ...

FerociousDave

Google by far, the spam is not too bad as although I get tonnes of it, Gmail seems to filter very well

ukbill69

Id keep an eye on microsoft as there new os windows vista has windows live search, then theres going to be a war.

Pennywise

Try the Open Directory Project - https://www.dmoz.org - it claims to be the world's largest "human edited" search engine, and I believe it is used by AOL/Google.

Also, I've heard of good results from https://www.ahoythere.com - this is a different type of seach engine that tries to match suppliers and customers instead of just being another directory.

It depends on what goods/services you're selling I suppose.

(And, no, I'm not in the pocket of either of the above suggestions in case you were wondering!)

save-a-lot

Hi

Look at the search engine relationship chart

http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

roll your mosue over it to see who feeds who in terms of results - getting a dmoz listing is probably the single best thing you can do. Also, it is a myth that you have to submit to search engines, their spiders will find you once you have your URL listed in signitures at forums, on other sites links pages, that is if you exchange links with other sites?