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If you have a favorite search engine that you use all the time, you might not realize how many other search engines people use. Some search engines operate in just one country or one region, and others do nothing but help people comparison shop for products.
Google
A googol is a mathematical term for a 1 digit followed by one hundred 0s, and served as the inspiration for the Google search engine name, signifying the immense size of the search index it searches. Google is used by more than 80 million searchers a month40 percent of all Web userstops of any search engine. Google is one of the five most-visited Web sites in the world, offering results in 35 languages with half of its visitors from outside the United States.
Yahoo!
Yahoo! (www.yahoo.com) is one of the most-visited sites on the Internet, but its visitors do a lot more than search. Yahoo! is a leading portal, offering news, e-mail, shopping, and many other functions to visitors who register. The Yahoo! search engine is the #2 search engine in the world, with more than one fourth of all searches.
MSN Search
MSN Search (www.msn.com) is ranked third in the search race by most counts, with about 14 percent of all searches worldwide, but Microsoft has long tried to increase its share of searches. Microsoft introduced new technology for MSN Search in early 2005, and is rumored to be developing a new search facility built in to a future version of the Windows operating system. Windows users would then be able to search their own computer, their company's servers, and the Internet within the same search.
AOL Search
Now part of media giant Time Warner, America Online (founded as Quantum Systems in 1985) was an online company before most people knew what the Internet was. AOL was the original portal, gradually making its proprietary service more and more Web-oriented over the years.
AOL Search (search.aol.com) is used mostly by AOL users, but that is still a lot of peopleadding up to more than 12 percent of total Web searches, good enough for fourth place worldwide. AOL has a partnership with Google, so search results on AOL Search are nearly the same as for Google (for both organic and paid search).
Ask Jeeves
Founded in 1996 as a "natural language" search engine. In recent years, Ask Jeeves has acquired several organic search engine companies and built a search engine many believe is the closest rival to Google in quality.
Metasearch Engines
Metasearch engines provide a way of searching multiple search engines, with the expectation that searching several different engines will provide better results than any one alone. Unfortunately, it does not, and relatively few searchers use metasearch engines.
Some metasearch engines, such as HotBot (www.hotbot.com), InfoSpace (www.infospace.com). Search marketers do not need to concern themselves with metasearch enginesif you are listed in the worldwide search engines, the few searchers who use metasearch engines will find your site, too.
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