I remember reading about a search engine submission company that claimed they would "re-submit your site every day for a year" for $xxx fee. The site in question shut down, once several of their clients found themselves banned from the search engines. The company I work for has five primary websites that I optimize for-I've never actually submitted any of them.
Guys, I found this through my own research. My first site I submitted to a lot of search engines including Google. Pretty much nothing happened for quite a few months. Things slowly picked up from there. My next site I submitted to Google and every week I checked the other search engines to see if they had picked up my submission from Google. result was only three out of about 50 picked up from Google submission. My next site I really found how this works. I submitted to 150+ search engines except for Google. Well, within two weeks Google had found about 20 search engines that had my site linked and it kept growing from there. My analysis. Google has the most deep reaching bots in town and I feel these bots look at the largest and most popular directories first and on a regular basis. Submitting to these directories is much quicker in getting your site noticed by Google than submitting to Google itself. However, I also find good quality site relevant backlinks are just as good. I did a site with no submissions but 4 x PR5 site relvant backlinks. Google did not see this site for over 2 months but when it did it went straight to PR4. Therefore, I would say in my opinion that you need a good mix of submissions (not to Google) and a site with good content and good quality site relevant backlinks to get your site seen quick by Google.