Who Powers Whom? Search Providers Chart

Some search engines get their results by turning to third-party "search providers" to "power" their listings. To make matters more confusing, these search providers may run their own search engine sites, as well.

The chart below explains who the major providers are. Knowing who powers whom is helpful for those who are wondering which companies are "winning" in the competitive market of powering search. Information is for users visiting the US/global version of the search engines listed, unless otherwise noted.

This information is also helpful to webmasters and search engine marketers trying to understand where to get listed.

Chart Key

Search Providers: These are listed at the top of each column. Read down to see what they power at major search engines. Click on their names to learn more about them.

Search Engines: These are listed at the beginning of each row, in order of share of searches shown on the comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings page. Here's a guide to the color coding:

• Dark Orange: search engines with 25 percent or greater share.
• Light Orange: search engines with 10 percent or greater share.
• Light Blue: search engines with 1 percent share or greater share.
• Gray: search engines with less than 1 percent share. They are shown only because of the name recognition they may still have among some long-time searchers or marketers.

Main: Indicates that a search provider provides the "main" editorial results to a particular search engine, the most dominant listings that will be seen.

Paid: Indicates that a search provider provides paid placement listings to a particular search engine. Also see the Buying Your Way In page for detailed information about paid listing partnerships.

Backup: Indicates that a search provider provides the "backup" results that appear in cases where a search engine's main results fail to find good matches. See the Search Engine Results Page for more about "backup" or "fallthrough" results.

Option: If shown in the notes section, Indicates that information from this source is made available either on results pages or in other ways, though the prominence of the information may not be high.

Dates: Where shown, dates indicate when a particular partnership is due for renewal. Dates are shown in MM/DD/YY or similar format.

Who Powers Whom? Chart

Notes

AOL renewed its deal with Google in October 2003 but did not specify exactly how long the partnership would last. Date shown is the minimum length estimated by Search Engine Watch, based on past deals between the two companies.

Excite Network is a collection of search sites owned by Ask Jeeves. For more details, see the comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings page.

Lycos has an existing contract with Yahoo-owned Overture for paid results running through May 2006. However, the company switched to Google in November 2003 due to a contract dispute. Google paid results also appear on Lycos-owned HotBot.com. For more, see coverage on the dispute from InternetNews.com, News.com and CBS MarketWatch. Lycos also runs its own paid listings in addition to those from Google on Lycos and HotBot. See Terra Lycos To Launch Paid Placement Network for more about this. A deal struck for backup results from the now Yahoo-owned AllTheWeb site was to expire on December 31, 2003. There's been no news of any renewal. The AllTheWeb search engine no longer uses its own technology. Instead, Lycos uses Yahoo main results (and flags these as being from Inktomi).