When push comes to shove, you need to care about only a handful of search
systems right now. You should care about them because if you can get your
site listed in these search systems, you will be in the systems that provide
search results to almost all Web searches! And, the winners are . . . (drum roll
please):

Google›
Yahoo!›

The Open Directory Project› Inktomi›

Teoma/Ask Jeeves›
AltaVista.com›
FAST/AlltheWeb›

Zeal (if you have a noncommercial Web site)›

I didn’t add possible up-and-comers like Grub and Nutch to this list — I’ll leave
them in the “may become important one day, better keep your eyes on them,
but it ain’t imminent” list for now. But that leaves one more important search
site that will be significant soon, if not by the time you read these words:

MSN

That’s not so bad, is it? You’ve just gone from thousands of sites down to nine.

You’ll also want to work with some other search systems, as you find out in

Chapters 9 and 10. In some cases, you need to check out specialty directories

and indexes related to the industry in which your Web site operates. But the

preceding systems are the important ones for every Web site.

Google alone provides 75 percent of all search results. Get into all the systems

on the preceding list, and you’re in front of probably over 95 percent of all

searchers. Well, perhaps you’re in front of them. You have a chance of being

in front of them, anyway, if your site ranks highly.