Hello Everybody, When it comes to starting a new site, I kind of know the basics as far as how to market....but what about if the new site is a search engine? The site is http://www.searchvortex.com/ I have started an Adwords Campaign (I'm not sure if advertising another search engine would be against their rules...but I put one up anyhow)...
I think you might want to increase the size of your database a bit ... and not market it as a search engine (competing with google) but say it's a Family Friendly directory or something like that.
Get 21,900,000 backlinks (same a google) I would suggest teaming up with a ppc party to fill in your search engine or use the xml feed from msn. Take a look at http://www.searchennetworks.com/ from a dp member who runs a search engine and is doing a great job. I believe it's very hard to start another 'big' search engine even msn with loads and loads of money can't compete with yahoo and google in traffic number's. Make the font a lot bigger at your homepage, it's unreadable.
It might also be worth making the links to people's sites static - at the moment submitting a site to your directory has no SEO benefit at all as the links appear to be redirects. Just a thought not sure what anyone else thinks?
frankm is right. I'd try to target a different market than for use as a search engine, could be a popular directory of some sorts though... Any "real" search engine worth using will cost more to run than most of us could afford..can't image the volume of storage and bandwidth it would take to be somewhat competitive.
Its difficult, you need a shorter and easy to remember Domain. Then make your site simple easy to load and focus on good Search. and patient for 5 years until your site get recognize. Cheers!
I have a niche search engine it works very well, but you have to make it niche to stand any chance in reality. make it niche, then, as you contact and include sites, send them an email telling them that they have been added to the niche directory. As long as you are fussy about who you put in there then you can claim to be so. Make them feel proud to be involved, and ask them to display a small banner or button on their site along the lines of 'we're in ournichsearch' this works very well in my experience. If your thinking about seriously having a proper search engine then unless you just won the lotterry every week for the last year, it isn't going to happen.
Let's be honest: you are gonna need millions of dollars if you want to be even a minor competitor to search engines like G and Y! Why not shift to being a directory and see where you go from there.
I don't understand what you use to search with. Type in Digital Point and you get 10 results, none relating to this site. In Google, you get 151 million results. That may be something to look at.
Unless you really are managing to be a niche as OWG suggests I query anyone starting a new search engine. There are tools out there to make it easier but unless you have control over the indexing algo, the spam filtering etc then you are just another me-too. Good luck, this is a huge initiative. Sarah