WHY SHOULD I PAY ANY ATTENTION TO MIDDLE TIER SEARCH ENGINES

It is true that Google, Yahoo, Bing dominate the search engine market and yes there is only a small slice of market share left over for the hundreds of other search engines to fight over... however

• market share is a relative thing when you have billions of searches going on from the big guys, but if the middle tier engines are delivering millions of searches, that is still worthwhile and nothing to sneeze at.
• the overall share of the mid tier engines may be small but the search numbers are still large. Alta Vista, Fast, Lycos etc. still command an incredible number of searches.
• many customers are branded exclusively to search engines that are not in the big 4.
• the search engine market is young... never put all your eggs in one basket, the leader today is not necessarily the leader tomorrow.
• many middle and third tier engines are heavily partnered and it never hurts to diversify your site between multiple partners.
• big engines buy little engines all the time for their technology and innovation with the indexes getting utilized in the acquisition.
• regional popularity where some small engines dominate particular geographic areas just like some foods are a specialty of a geographic region.
• competition is a wonderful thing, support the little guy to avoid monopolies that are unhealthy and will ultimately cost you $$$.

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