This brief lesson is intended to provide some insight into who owns who in the contemporary search world and which search engines provide results for which. By knowing this, you will better understand which of them are the best to target when optimizing your pages.
A while ago, there were many different engines, almost equally popular among visitors that were constantly competing in popularity, number of searches, efficiency of search technology, number of indexed pages, etc. Nowadays, after a period of incorporation, all the minor companies are owned by the larger entities.
Who Owns Who
* Yahoo! owns AllTheWeb, Lycos and AltaVista. Yahoo! also owns and uses Inktomi's technology and database for all the partnering engines under its wing.
* Google partners with AOL, it is also a major result provider for many large engines because of its own cutting-edge technology (Netscape, Ask.com, Iwon).
* Live Search does not own anybody and uses its own database (since February, 2005).
Who Feeds Who
The most outstanding work in the field of relationships between search result providers and consumers, and known to all SEO experts, is Bruce Clay's SE relationship chart. Here we provide a static representation. The dynamic (and much more convenient) version is available at
http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm
Here's the search engine relationship chart:
The search engine relationship chart
Here's what you should remember from this lesson:
If you want to appear high up in the result list of a search engine that is a data consumer from another engine, target the parent engine, as you will most probably appear in the listings of all its children.
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