My Search Engine Preferences

Although Google reigns king over the SEO industry it is not, in my opinion, the best search engine for all situations. On about 80% of the terms I look for Google is my first and only stop but you are probably more interested in how I divide the remaining 20%.

Yahoo.com 5% - I generally use Yahoo as a secondary search option. If I am not finding relevant pages for my terms in Google I will generally see what Yahoo has to offer rather than digging 5+ pages deep.

Technorati.com 5% - Right now Technorati one of my top blogging resources. If I want to find material to blog about or simply browse the blogosphere this is my first stop.

Sphere.com 5% - Sphere is climbing my charts pretty quickly. The general concept here is you add a Sphere It button to your toolbar and whenever you stumble upon an interesting page or article you click the button and it pulls up a list of other related pages. It looks like they still need to tweak a few things before their searches are highly relevant though.

MSN.com 3% - I pretty much only use MSN as an SEO tool. Last year they were by far the fastest page indexer. Over the course of a year they have taken a real speed hit but they still display the most comprehensive list of backlinks in their results.

Others 2% - I occasionally browse through ask.com or some of the other smaller search engines just to see how they are developing.