Understanding how popular search engines work and how they are related is important to any search engine marketing campaign. Although most people don't focus much beyond search results on their screen - there's an enormous world of results being provided and shared between many of today's most popular search engines.

As the booming business of search marketing continues to rise, relationships between the major search engines and directories are emerging and adapting to keep pace with the constantly changing needs of the internet surfing community.

The relationships between major search engines in 2008 is outlined below to help illustrate how the search results you see are generated and shared.

How are search results generated by the major search engines?
Main search results come from a variety of places. Some search engines produce results by crawling the web themselves to generate results, while others leverage results generated from other search engine sources.

Natural or Organic Search Results
These results are generated by algorithms defined by each individual search engine.

Paid or Sponsored Search Results
These results are placed based on advertiser competition and paid placement.

Human Powered Search Results
These results are generated by a human powered selection process or a combination of human and natural or paid results.

What are considered to be Natural or Organic search results?
Many popular search engines crawl the internet constantly to generate the "organic or natural" search results. This is an automated process based on complicated algorithms. In contrast, other search engines produce results by using other search engines to crawl the internet and provide their "organic or natural" search results. These results are what you see in the middle of the search results page in the search engines.

The results in the natural or organic search results are earned by website owners based on factors such as optimization, length of time website has been online, content on a website, links within the website, links coming in from other websites, and other important elements of online marketing. These results take time to earn because the search engines are designed to provide relevant results for internet searchers. Relevance is based on a series of algorithms and rules established by each search engine.

These results are NOT the ones called "sponsored" or PPC links found at the top and right side of the search results.

What are PAID search results and what you should know about them...
Important differences between the natural or organic search results and the PAID results exist that you should know. The PAID search results are commonly referred to as PPC or Pay Per Click and are easily occupied quickly by the highest bidder.

The PAID or SPONSORED search results, on the other hand, are generated based on advertiser competition and internet search activity. These results are different simply because anyone can simply "buy" their way into these search results. Even though the PPC or Sponsored link business is booming, conversion rates for these types of links are typically less.

What are HUMAN powered or directory search results?
Some search engines provide a complete or partial list of search results from a human edited process. These types of search results also rely on a partnership with another search engine with a crawler based process. This way, there is always a way to provide answers to any search. If there are no human edited results, for example, the results from the paid, natural or organic results are displayed to provide relavent results for the search.

2008 Major Search Engine Chart

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