Most people optimize their website for Google. They look for keywords that are good on Google, they check SERPs on Google, etc. Has anyone had any luck doing this for a different search engine? Yahoo? MSN?
Unless you are bent on gaming the system, if you follow guidelines used to rank well in Google you will usually rank well in other search engines. Microsoft keeps playing with there "live search" and to try and optimize for them is mostly a waste because they simply don't have the traffic. Do a search on MSN or Yahoo for a long tail keyword phrase and see how accurate they are in returning results. Hard to optimize for search engines that return poor results.
Every search engines are working, based on the same optimization concepts only but their way of process may different (Algorithm). You do not worry about that, you should focus on your content and back links automatically you will get good SERP in every Search Engines.
there is no point in optimizing for any search engines other than Google. Google provides the best and the most accurate results. moreover, if you optimize your website for Google, it will be automatically optimized for the other two. Yahoo! and MSN are fast losing market and especially Yahoo!. See the stock quotes for them: Google - 346.45 Yahoo! - 12.14 MSN - 18