Online Traction

Don’t misinterpret the title as suggesting that there exist search engines for cults and radical groups. Though that may be true, Pandia.com has a great article on the alternative search engines. The essential idea is that although Google, Yahoo and MSN command over 90% of search engine searches there is a significant wedge of market occupied by smaller fish namely ask, gigablast, factbites, exalead and snap that deserve our attention.

For website owners it is smart to submit your sites to these search engines and monitor your traffic. This probably won’t generate significant traffic but there is a possibility of hitting a rich seam of market where your competitors may not exist, yet.

Also, now that Google Adwords is costing more and more, check out the pay-per-click advertising systems of these smaller search engines.
Personally I’m finding that I use a few different search engines for more obtuse searches. I still start at Google but for example I use Jux2 (a meta search engine ie. aggregates and weights search results from yahoo, google and msn) if I can’t find the object of my search in Google.

While I’m at it I’m noticing more and more search engine pollution caused by webmasters who publish multiple websites to take advantage of affiliate marketing and Google Adsense.