Ask is really Google, Lycos is really Yahoo?

We see many, many search engines out there but how many are actually stand alone engines? The image on the left was created by the Ghengis Khan of SE0, Mr Bruce Clay and all credits go to him for the image.

Search Engines

Ok so we know that search engines are the main way to search, however there are many different types of search engines. You have all heard of Google, Yahoo, Lycos, AOL, Alta Vista, All The Web, Bing, Ask and Netscape? But what search engine powers the others?

We studied the the trends on searches via different search engines and we noticed a lot of similarities from a search engine optimization viewpoint.

Google

Whilst looking at the search engine rankings on Google we compared them to ask.com, netscape.com and aol.com and we saw that the correlation was too close with the search engine ranks. They had to be linked and they were. Google powers the other three search engines.

 

Yahoo

Once again we started to see the search engine rankings of yahoo being so similar to the search engines alltheweb.com, lycos.com and altavista.com that we had to deduce that yahoo was actually feeding these engines from their database.

Bing

Bing used to be msn live and also live search. They are the stand alone operation from microsoft. They have arounf 11% of all traffic.

What we can do with this knowledge is to optimize for the parent search engines and thus they will feed the data to their children search engines.