At 9.30pm PST on 17th February, Yahoo.com rolled out its new search facility dropping Google results after 3.5 years!

The new results are based on crawls from the Yahoo crawling engines Inktomi, FAST/ATW and AltaVista with particular emphasis on Inktomi. Results from the other engines and the Yahoo Directory appear to add weighting to the new results with Inktomi being used for commercial searches and (it appears) FAST data being used for obscure searches. Inktomi paid inclusion URLs are currently included - although paid inclusion for web pages (apart from feeds) may be an additional extra for Inktomi subscribers from April 15th.

It as anticipated that these results will roll-out over other Yahoo sites worldwide over the next few weeks.

Google has just lost it's near monopoly!

More at WebmasterWorld!

2. Google's New Improved Version?

Since the somewhat interesting change in Google's method of determining ranking back in November, several tweaks and a couple of updates have taken place, we have received an enormous number of calls and e-mails from people asking what they should do to their websites. Rather than come out with the usual waffle about "wait and see" etc., we have spent some time looking to see if there was a way out of the Google morass which has now occurred.

Firstly, the answer to the main question asked by the majority of people contacting us:

Do I believe that re-optimisation of your site will have any effect? No. I do not believe that any radical on-page optimisation changes will make the slightest difference to the new way that Google identifies sites to rank highly. It is pretty much all off-the-page criteria that are doing well.

The only thing that might assist which you can do on-site is exploiting Google's love of text links (which is why so many directories/portals are showing up). This can be done by having a souped-up site map creating a mini-directory for each page on your site. This has had some limited success for us but still won't overcome the problems for the more competitive terms.

The only way to do that, as far as I can see, is for Google to deem your site as an authority site. How it does this seems to be on the strength of the total links coming into that site when a search term is selected and a short-list of sites is returned including both that term AND the semantically related terms found by Google . So you may be an authority on your subject - but Google devalues that. Instead it looks for the sites returned for a search and then views the largest and strongest number of links coming to the root page of the sites, then selecting the ones with the most as those to come up first even if the phrase is mentioned merely in passing on the page. This is why sub domains are working so well and you get endless lists of Amazon, e-bay, Dealtime and Kelcoo etc! These sites have strong PageRank and a mere mention of the search term or a related search term on the page of an "authority" site would return that site in the top results. This produced some farcical results, returning a garden centre for a search for business centres in a major city and Chinese lessons for someone looking for a completely unrelated commercial service in another location.

Tweaks appear underway to bring down this "authority" threshold and search relevance is getting better - but I think Google has a long way to go yet to recover it's previously good name with commercial webmasters!

3. FindWhat and Espotting Deal Closes.

After much delay FindWhat have finalised their deal to purchase Espotting valuing the company at well over $100 million - despite Espotting showing losses over the past two years. We wish them well and look forward to their enhanced presence in the European marketplace.

4. 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 Overture UK (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). Top listings available via Overture UK.
• Inktomi - it powers some or all of the results on MSN, LookSmart, About, Sprinks, Overture, HotBot, Overture UK, Espotting and several UK portals. Costs from $39 per page per year!
• Google - still free - though you can get paid listings via AdWords or AdWords Select if you want to appear in less than 2-3 months! Powers some results on AOL, Yahoo, IWon and BT LookSmart network backup results in the UK.
• ODP - completely free.
• LookSmart - Now offers free submission and is changing in to a PPC engine. No longer on our must do list since losing MSN UK and MSN US. Their deal with Inktomi also ends this month.
• 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.
• AllTheWeb - provides results to Freeserve, a number of European searches as well as the widely used Lycos engines now up to $34 per URL per year.
• MSN - Overture for top listings plus Inktomi which uses paid inclusion. LookSmart will power directory results in the US until January 15th 2004.
• 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
• Overture UK - minimum bid 10p - provides results to many UK versions of SEs plus ISPs such as Freeserve. Pay for placement.
• Espotting - minimum bid 10p - provides results to several UK and European portals and via many affiliates. Pay for placement.
• Teoma - powers Ask Jeeves US plus Ask Jeeves UK and is now starting to be sold as an alternative engine database (like Google and Inktomi) - $25.00 per page.
• Ask UK - now allows separate submission to the UK portion of their database from £40.00 per page per year.

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?

Our Search Engine Spy site has details of many UK directories and search engines as well as tips on submission and optimisation.

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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