search game for many years

been in the search game for many years.

is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link
is a natural citation or not.

has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give
them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results

things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

MSN Search



new to the search game

is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature

due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content


their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results

likes bursty recent links

new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN
Search

things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

Google



has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much
cleaner than the current web graph

is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true
editorial citation or an artificial link

looks for natural link growth over time

heavily biases search results toward informational resources

trusts old sites way too much

a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related
trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations

they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with
similar content

if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for
that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a
page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently
outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that
modifier

crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality.
Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or
even included in the index.

things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in
Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

Ask



looks at topical communities

due to their heavy emphasis on topical communities they are slow to rank sites
until they are heavily cited from within their topical community

due to their limited market share they probably are not worth paying much
attention to unless you are in a vertical where they have a strong brand that
drives significant search traffic