Free Search Engines
Several search engines do not charge for keyword and URL submissions, however some of these free programs will not show your ad frequently enough to make a significant impact on your marketing efforts. Free search engines can go a long way toward promoting your site, but there is no guarantee that your ad will be rated highly, so beware of those who will try to mislead you into believing so. Do your own research and see how, and where, your company information will be presented. It's also important to check on your submissions frequently to make sure you are still listed!
Paid Search Engines
More recently, search engines have been offering very cost effective programs to ensure that your ads appear when a visitor enters in one of your keywords. This new trend is to charge you on a Cost per Click model (CPC). It works like this. You choose the keywords most relevant to your site, business and services and this in turn reaches your focus groups, because your ads will appear when a visitor types in your pre-selected keywords. You just select an amount that you are willing to pay when visitors click on your listings. The higher you bid per keyword, the higher your ad appears in the search results. Google offers such a program called Google Ad Select-- take a look at https://adwords.google.com/select/main.Utilizing CPC-based programs on search engines gives you complete control over your campaign, from beginning to end. You choose how much you want to pay, so you can set yourself up on a daily, weekly or even monthly budget. You also have access to your reporting stats and you can monitor your listings as frequently as you like. If you see that certain keywords are under-performing (not getting clicked on), you can increase the CPC for that keyword and see how the higher bid goes. It's all trial and error in the beginning, so consistently viewing your keyword stats will allow you to best optimize your listings and maximize your future ROI (Return on Investment) in the search engine!
News Search Engines
If you are still looking for news using "normal" search engines, stop doing it! You'll find the services below to be a much better way to search for the latest news stories from hundreds of sources on the web. These services provide exceptionally good results for current event searching, because they crawl only news sites and revisit these sites several times per day. Thus, the results are usually focused and timely.
Metacrawlers Or Meta Search Engines
Unlike search engines, metacrawlers don't crawl the web themselves to build listings. Instead, they allow searches to be sent to several search engines all at once. The results are then blended together onto one page. Below are some of the major metacrawlers. Also see the Search Utilities page for metacrawler-style software that you can run from your desktop.
