The News this Month!

1. Yahoo to buy Inktomi!

In a surprise announcement, just before Christmas, Yahoo announced that it had made an agreement with Inktomi to buy the company outright for a price of $1.65 per share. This amounts to a purchase price of some $235 million! It appears that this deal is due to be completed within the 1st quarter of 2003 provided it is approved by both stockholders and US regulatory authorities.

For the past 2 years, Yahoo has been using Google to supply their back-up results (initially) and for the last few months, their main results also. However, with this purchase, it looks as if it is to be "all change" at Yahoo in the near future. Inktomi used to supply Yahoo prior to the Google deal and has recently expanded its' index to over 2 billion pages. As Google gains in popularity, Yahoo may now view them more as a threat than a partner and the acquisition of Inktomi (which will be a wholly owned subsidiary company continuing to operate under the Inktomi name) allows them to possibly earn money from search results rather than having to pay a competitor. How this will affect results on Yahoo has yet to be seen - but it is certain that this will have a radical impact on the search engine market in the year ahead!

2. Yahoo UK drops directory listings as default!.

Yahoo UK has now changed their default search results to pure Google results and now replicate the results on the main Yahoo. The main difference between Yahoo main and the UK is the fact that Yahoo UK allows sites to be filtered for UK or Irish sites. This has greatly devalued the worth of the directory. After all, why pay for a listing when you can get in through Google for free? But the changes coming about may restore the value of a directory listing. We'll continue to use paid review for the time being. We are in interesting times. Could we be about to see a combination of directory listings plus Inktomi listings? Who knows!

3. HotBot Relaunch!

HotBot has been the Cinderella of search engines for some time! Terra Lycos (who own the search portal) have done very little with it over the past couple of years - but that has all changed. Lycos have relaunched HotBot with a new, clean interface and the ability to search 4 main search engines swiftly and efficiently from one place. Unlike meta-engines which bundle results from individual search engines and package in results from PPC engines, HotBot allows you to search on FAST, Google, Inktomi and Teoma with a simple 1 click action. Coupled with the HotBot advanced search facilities, this can greatly simplify searches and give surfers a broader spread of results. When we used it, we were surprised at the difference in results on certain searches - with both Inktomi and Teoma giving some highly relevant results for searches which produced rubbish on Google - and, of course, vice-versa! This is well worth trying out. We think it is a winner!

On a secondary note, HotBot UK has reverted to a pure Inktomi search engine. It had changed to Fast/AllTheWeb results.

In the US, Lycos will be having a "multi-million $" campaign to promote the HotBot brand and will be playing down the Lycos search in favour of HotBot.

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 Espotting.
• 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 Freeserve, AOL, Yahoo, IWon and BT LookSmart network backup results in the UK.
• ODP - completely free.
• LookSmart - feeds results to AltaVista, Excite (note: Excite is now a meta-engine - not a search engine in its' own right) MSN, iWon, CNN, Time Warner and another 370 ISPs. $49 (plus $150 deposit) then 15 cents per referral and (if you want to appear in the UK) £149 for LS UK but likely to change with the takeover of LS UK by the US. Description changes cost extra. 
• 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 up to $34 per URL per year.
• MSN - LookSmart for Directory and Overture for top listings plus Inktomi which uses paid inclusion.
• 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 plus Ask Jeeves UK 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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