The News this Month!

1. DirectHit Closes and Teoma Opens!

Ask Jeeves owned DirectHit shut up shop at the beginning of the month and now re-directs to Ask's latest acquisition Teoma. With the aim of confronting Google head-on in terms of providing speed and additional relevancy, Teoma has been gaining a fair amount of press attention over the last few weeks. The results are clean, with no advertising but with 2 listings from Overture at the top. One of the more useful innovations is to have a series of expert links relating to your subject down the right-hand side of the screen which allows for some very focused results. Although their database is currently quite small, the integrity of the results is pretty high. They aim to continue building their index by crawling directories, but also have a paid inclusion program which is available via INeedHits (who are also an Inktomi paid-inclusion provider). 

Ask US have already started showing Teoma results on their search portal, and it is expected the Ask UK should follow suit shortly. The DirectHit database is still being supplied to HotBot US and MSN - but with the DB not being updated further, it is anticipated that these too will switch to Teoma. DirectHit technology is going to be used within Teoma to measure the 'popularity' of sites and will assist in their ranking algorithm. 

Both Teoma and WiseNut have been put forward as up-and-coming search facilities which could beat some of the other main engines. What they both needed was some significant marketing muscle behind them in order to have a chance. They now both have it with Ask backing Teoma and LookSmart promoting WiseNut. People in the industry like these two engines - now we will see if the surfing public take to them too.

2. Overture Sues Google!

Google has long been seen as the search engine which has not given in to commercial greed, by not hosting banners, not becoming a portal and not using any form of paid inclusion. This is not strictly true as they have been delivering keyword driven advertisements for some time - either as highlighted listings at the top of the results, or as Google AdWords along the right margin of the results page.

Recently Google launched a pay-per-click version of their AdWords program and has been seen by Overture as having crossed into their arena. This was probably triggered by Earthlink (an American ISP) dropping Overture to show Google's PPC AdWords listings as 'featured' listings on their search portal.

Overture filed their patent for PPC delivery in 1999 and it was awarded by the US Patent Office last year. 

The lawsuit for unspecified damages was filed at the beginning of the month and there has been no comment from Google apart from denying breach of the Overture patent.

Overture filed suit against FindWhat in the US some time ago for the same breach and it will be interesting to see what the US Courts decide in this confusing matter.

3. MakeMeTop at SES!

We will have an exhibit at the prestigious Search Engine Strategies 2002 in London on April 23rd and 24th. Hosted by the well-known Danny Sullivan, of Search Engine Watch fame and attended by all the major search engines and leaders in search engine marketing - we look forward to seeing many of you there. It will be great to meet many of the people who we feel we know well through e-mail and forum postings - but have never met face-to-face!

4. SERPs-Watch Launched!

We started our live beta-test of SERPs-Watch last month and it is now available to all MakeMeTop subscribers. What is SERPs-Watch? It comes from the acronym SERPs which means Search Engine Results Page. It is an automatically scheduled ranking checker which can allow a subscriber to see how their results progress on a weekly basis and can also be used to monitor major competitors positions on the major search portals. The ability to check positions in real time through a simple and fast interface is also available. Via SERPs-Watch, clients also have access to other detailed information on the progress of their promotion campaign, including traffic graphs, keywords used to find the site and other information designed to give the client all the data required to determine the ROI on their investment in our SEO services. More facilities are being added on a monthly basis.

Our aim is to make SERPs-Watch the easiest method of monitoring an SEO campaign in a simple to understand manner.

5. Which search engines cost what?

With fees changing every month, we are keeping this list updated regularly - so users can see what the latest costs are. As always, not a lot of free submissions out there so don't get taken in by the ever growing list of people offering mass-submissions. They just don't work for any of the main search facilities that drive real traffic.

Here are the main search facilities and the basic costs for faster review/inclusion. You can get discounts for more URLs.

• Yahoo US! - $299 for business and commercial sites (review only and then annual inclusion fee). Top listings available via Overture (US only) and Espotting (UK only). Only use Yahoo US submission if you can't get in through Yahoo UK!
• Yahoo UK! - £199 for business and commercial sites (review one-off, non-recurring fee).
• Inktomi - it powers some or all of the results on AOL, MSN, iWon, LookSmart, About, Sprinks, Overture, HotBot, Overture UK, Espotting and most UK portals. Costs from $39 per page per year!
• Google - still free - though you can get paid listings via AdWords if you want to appear in less than 2-3 months!
• ODP - completely free.
• LookSmart - feeds results to AltaVista, Excite, MSN, iWon, CNN, Time Warner and another 370 ISPs. $299 and (if you want to appear in the UK) £149 for LS UK. Description changes for $199 and you can add categories for another $199. You can also have up to 5 pages listed so (if you went for them all) if you did this in both the UK and US expect to spend up to $1495 and £745! Pretty expensive.
• AltaVista - still used by a significant number of users from $60 per page per year. Can get to the top by paying Overture. LookSmart for directory.
• FAST - provides results to a number of European searches as well as the widely used Lycos engines now $12 per URL per year.
• MSN - LookSmart for Directory and Overture for top listings plus Inktomi which uses paid inclusion.
• UKPlus - a £99 fee to get reviewed in a reasonable time-frame.
• Overture - provides featured results to many meta-engines, plus AltaVista, Excite, HotBot (US), Lycos (US), MSN and Netscape - plus many other search portals. Pay for placement. Minimum fee £25
• Teoma - powers Ask Jeeves US and is now starting to be sold as an alternative engine database (like Google and Inktomi) - $25.00 per page.

It will become harder and harder to get a free listing if you are a business - but make sure, before you pay the engines, that you understand what you are doing to make sure your pages/site appear high up in the listings! These payments specify rapid inclusion - not high rankings. The site/pages still need to be optimised.

If you have any further questions about the major search engines - why not ask your questions about this or many other subjects on our free information forums?

We also have many resources which are designed to make your optimisation tasks easier. As always, MakeMeTop is here to help get you seen on the web. If you have any queries, comments or feedback on the information contained in this report, please let us know. It must be stated that all comments and ideas listed in this document come from the editor's research and are solely his opinions! For more information and tips on getting top search engine rankings visit Search Engine World, Pandia and Search Engine Watch or read our tips on designing a search engine friendly page. See other news, views and search engine happenings at sites we find useful at Webmaster World, Pandia, Search Engine Watch and Ihelpyou Forums. A free weekly newsletter is available from High Rankings Advisor and is also well worth the read.

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