After all there are many search engines and Google is GOOGLE! but what algorithms and techniques should we adopt to give preference to Search Engines?
Basically, just make sure all of your pages are keyword optimized and the search engines will pick you up eventually. Google is the one to aim for, you will get the most traffic per keyword from them since they have about 75% market share. Live is usually quite quick, but it doesn't get much search traffic. Yahoo is very slow to index. Not sure what's going on there these days, and ASK hasn't indexed a single page of mine for over 5 months.
Yep, Aim for google, but also try and get alright rankings from the others aswell. The main thing that you have to do though is not totally rely on search engines for all your traffic just incase something bad happens one day and you are banned or your rankings have lowered in Google.
My assumption is that if a site has indexed in google, the other search engines follow it, however it is good if you optimize it in yahoo as yahoo is more focus on on-page factors.
Yes Google is definitely the one. Yahoo can take up to 5 months to index a site, and then only indexes some of the pages. Live is quick, however the traffic from Live for me is small even though I rank well, and as for ASK I don't even know if they're still in the game, they haven't indexed a single page for over 5 months now.