The Most Popular Search Engines

For the most possible site visitors, you will want to be listed on as many search engines and directories as possible. To save time, be sure to keep track of your search engine ranking on these major search engines.

• Google is the most popular with the most relevant results
• Yahoo uses Google results as well as their own directory results
• AOL uses Google results and is used by AOL customers
• MSN uses Looksmart results and is connected to Hotmail
• Ask Jeeves/Teoma allows you to type a phrase or question
• Overture includes Go.com powered by Google
• InfoSpace powers Dogpile, Excite, Webcrawler, Metacrawler
  uses results from Google • Looksmart • Inktomi • Ask Jeeves • About • Overture • FindWhat • FAST • Teoma
• Netscape uses Google results
• Altavista was very popular and still is on the West coast
• Lycos was very popular and is connected with Hotbot
• Earthlink uses Google results and is used by Earthlink dialup Internet users
• Looksmart - MSN, About.com, AltaVista and other leading sites use LookSmart's search results
• Alltheweb is powered by FAST
• Open Directory Project is a human edited directory that lists websites by categories

Yvette Kuhns, Power Pages Web Design, June 5, 2003

Qsearch tracked the actions of one million U.S. Internet users to provide the following statistics, first reported by SearchEngineWatch.com.

The following are the percentage of total searches for each of the major search engines:
Google - 32%
Yahoo! - 25%
AOL - 19%
MSN - 15%
Ask Jeeves - 3%
Others - 6%
( SearchEngineWatch.com, August 1, 2003)

This means that 75% of all searches by U.S. Internet users are powered by the database results of one search engine company, Google.

Update July 31, 2007: Google is still most popular. MSN Search (powered by Windows Live) and Yahoo are very popular. Ask (powered by Teoma) is still up there.

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