A prodigal webmaster returns to the Web and has experiences with major and minor search engines.

May of 2007 was a momentous time in my life because it was towards the end of that month that I finally returned to the Web as a content publisher after a six year vacation. My first new site was a simple blog -- that, naturally, would prevent me from discovering exactly how much or how little of web design I actually remembered. Having created the blog and regularly posted to it for a couple of weeks, I decided it was time for me to share my site with the world. Although I've not been a web publisher for some time, I never gave up my addiction to devouring web content so I maintain a large selection of search engine and directory bookmarks. One by one, I went through the collection of links I'd assembled over the years and submitted my new site to each search engine and directory that would allow me to do so for free. And then...I waited.

I was not so naive as to be waiting for hits -- my past experiences as a webmaster taught me well how elusive those things can be. Instead, I was waiting to be indexed. I was keenly interested in how my site -- a content-rich but not at all search engine optimized blog -- would be received by search engines, especially the majors. To my surprise, Live Search added me very quickly to its index. Yahoo! soon followed suit. Google alone of the three majors scoffed at me. As the weeks turned into a month, I feared I'd fallen into what I'd heard other webmasters speak of with horror and loathing: the Google sandbox. As it turned out, my experience with the sandbox was relatively innocuous -- my blog was soon featured obscurely in the Google index after about a month. Google also did the best job of exploring my site out of the major search engines.

My experience did make me think twice about the search engines I use on a regular basis, though. I've used Google as my primary search engine since 1998, and I've largely been pleased with the search results I get from Google. I'm too interested in the Internet not to play around with other search engines from time to time, but at the end of the day I've basically been a Google search guy for the last nine years. My experience as a returning webmaster taught me an important lesson, though: Google doesn't necessarily have the freshest index around. There are doubtless thousands of websites in queue waiting to be introduced into the Google index...and these sites may well already be indexed by Live Search and/or Yahoo! That is potentially a chink in the Google armor; I expect my search engine to keep up with a World Wide Web that is growing rapidly. Admittedly, I would not trade irrelevant search results for fresh content -- I unreasonably want both relevancy and freshness, but relevancy is more important to me than freshness, so as long as Google continues to usually give me good search results I'll probably continue to use it as my primary search engine. However, Live Search and Yahoo! have definitely given me something to think about, and I've begun using both search engines more.

I was a little surprised by something else, too: the smaller search engines appear to generally be overburdened. It seems like it takes longer to get listed by them than by the big boys, which makes me question if they have the resources to be competitive in the search engine world. Choice is good, but search engines that don't actually index the web aren't particularly useful to anyone, especially someone who is seriously searching for information.