The search engines are large corporations, with complex ownerships and partnerships between them. While some are more technology oriented and mainly outsource their database and crawling software, others are commercially-specific and will speculate on their large user audience to sell you listings and advertising opportunities.

This brief lesson is intended to give you an insight of who owns who in the contemporary search world and which search engines provide the results for which. Knowing this, you will better understand which ones are the best to target when you're optimizing your pages.

A while ago, there were many different engines, almost equally popular among visitors, that were constantly competing in popularity, number of searches, efficiency of search technology, number of indexed pages, etc. Nowadays, after a period of incorporation, all minor companies are owned by the larger ones.

Who Owns Who

• Yahoo! owns Overture, AllTheWeb, and AltaVista. Yahoo! also owns and uses Inktomi's technology and database for all the partnering engines under its wing.
• Google doesn't own any other search entity worth mentioning here, however it is a major result provider for many large engines because of its own cutting-edge technology.
• Ask Jeeves (Ask.com) owns and uses the Teoma (formerly DirectHit) engine, results and crawler.
• MSN does not own anybody and uses its own database (since February, 2005).
• AOL does not own anybody.
• Lycos owns HotBot and Tripod.
• Netscape owns DMOZ.

Who Feeds Who

The most outstanding work in the field of relationships between search result providers and consumers is Bruce Clay's SE relationship chart known by all SEO experts. Here we provide a static representation, and the dynamic (and much more convenient) version is available at

http://www.bruceclay.com/searchenginerelationshipchart.htm

Here's the search engine relationship chart:

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