Which Search Engines to Concentrate On

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I am new to search marketing and need to figure out which search engines to concentrate on.

Actually, there are only three search engines you should care about: Google, Yahoo and MSN. There are various estimates of their individual search market shares, but all the experts agree that together the Big Three serve at least 95% of all the searches made in the world. From my experience, I can tell that Google delivers about 65% of the overall search engine traffic, Yahoo brings another 22-23%, and MSN accounts for additional 10-12%.

Other search engines that bring some traffic are: AltaVista, AOL, Ask Jeeves, InfoSpace, Go.com, Dogpile, AllTheWeb, Earth Link, Excite, Overture and Netscape. However, most of these engines use search databases of the Big Three: AltaVista and Overture belong to Yahoo and use its results; AOL, Netspace and Go.com use results from Google; InfoSpace, Excite, Dogpile and many more combine results from both Google, Yahoo and some other search engines and directories. It means, that once your website is indexed by Google, Yahoo and MSN, it will appear in almost every considerable search engine in the world.