Special Report: Search Engine Marketing

MSN gets its search results from myriad sources. The Web Pages section is provided by Yahoo!, although MSN drops all Yahoo! paid-inclusion results from the provided list. Although you can submit directly to MSN, Clay says, you’d be better off directly submitting to Yahoo! for the time being.

Using a crawler to spider the Web, Ask Jeeves uses Teoma 2.0 to employ its branded Subject-Specific Popularity. This ranks a site based on the number of same-subject pages in other ranked sites that link to it (not just general popularity such as page count) to determine a site’s level of authority. As with Inktomi, Teoma has no free “add URL” page. But also like Inktomi, Teoma crawls the Web, so if you have links pointing at your site, you may get included naturally. Last June, Ask Jeeves discontinued its paid-inclusion program.