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In the last year, there has been a small but growing subset of meta search engines that have chosen to focus their main competitive strategy on providing specialty searches (Yahoo! Finance).

As the industry continues to grow and become increasingly more complex, meta searches are forming strategic alliances with larger search engines and advertising providers. This trend means that a large portion of their revenue is based on a PPC, or “pay-per-click” advertising campaigns. Google Ad Words and Yahoo! Search Marketing (Overture) are commonly seen on meta search engines. Large meta searches with profitable revenue models are buying up smaller meta searches to profit off of their traffic.

Despite the similarity of their technologies, meta search engines have become very popular in the search marketplace. Infospace, one of the industry’s leaders, bought up four meta search engines, including Dogpile.com, that are basically the same, with some small technological differences. The only big differences are in marketing and, despite their similar technologies, they have carved out a distinct marketplace, altogether amounting to almost 1% of all searches (Nielsen search ratings 2005). This is 1/16th the size of an MSN search, and a huge percentage in the search engine marketplace. The marketing for these meta searches is almost identical and completely based off of one or two simple strategies:

1) First page results on Yahoo, MSN, and Google have very little overlap. If you want to combine more first page results, you have to visit all three; meta searches combines them all for you.

2) Clustering, or grouping items by category and authority, i.e. sites that have the most links on the most search engines will produce the most relevant results.

This is emphasized by advertising, press releases, and sales pitches. While these meta search engines compete on other levels as well, these are the primary directions that most competitive efforts go towards.

Technorati Tags: search engine recognition, search engine, SEO experts, meta search engines, meta search engine, search engines, Infospace, Dogpile, metasearch

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