Below is a list of links to the "submit url" pages of the major search engines and directories, with notes on the information they require and how long they estimate it takes to get listed (if they give an estimate). The "browsers" that index your pages are called web robots, crawlers, or spiders, and you can see when your site is being indexed by watching for them in your site statistics.     The Internet is packed with services that will offer website submission to hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of search engines and directories. However, there are reasons why you might prefer to submit your website individually to just the most popular directories:     - You can avoid a lot of junk email, for one thing (if you use a service such as SubmitSmart, it is a good idea to use a email address solely for this purpose, which you do not mind being deluged with junk email).     - Also, although it might take you some hours to submit your site yourself (particularly to the directories), you will have the confidence of KNOWING that the submission actually went through (this can be of much concern when you are waiting weeks or even months to be listed).     - If you submit to the "majors" individually, you will be covering the vast majority of Internet users.     - You can still use an automated submission service to reach the others, if you want to.

  Search Submissions (direct links to site submission pages):

Search engines that really do crawl and index entire websites:
    Google requires your URL and some descriptive comments, and makes no claim regarding how soon you will be listed. The Google crawler is called Googlebot. Unlike some web crawlers, Googlebot has no trouble indexing sites using frames (even if your "domain/index.html" page is a framese page, you can get listed).
    Google results are displayed on many other so called "search engines" such as HotBot and Netscape, dramatically increasing the value of Google listings to your site. For browsing, they use the DMOZ Open Directory, which is a separate free submission.

"Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence." from The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Google founders Sergey Brin & Lawrence Page

Google PageRank Explained by Phil Craven - The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works by Ian Rogers
Google PigeonRank (April Fools)

    This page at Yahoo! (Inktomi) is now the only place where you can submit to the index formerly known as Inktomi. You must register for Yahoo's free services (email, etc.) before you can submit your website to the index. You enter only the top-level page of your site, and their crawler will index the rest of your site from there. "Expect a delay of several weeks before your URL is crawled."
    The separate submission pages at other search websites have disappeared. In early 2003 Yahoo! bought Inktomi, whose search index powered the HotBot, MSN, and other search engines, for $235 million. Until then, Yahoo! had been using Google search results. Slurp, "Inktomi's Web Robot" is now "Yahoo!'s Web Crawler".
    In mid 2003 Yahoo! bought Overture for $1.63 billion US in cash and stock. This acquisition included the AltaVista and FAST search engines, previously purchased by Overture. In 2005, Yahoo! changed the name of Overture (which was GoTo.com before it was Overture) to Yahoo! Search Marketing.
    Yahoo's takeover of Inktomi has devalued the index somewhat; MSN, Lycos, and Hotbot no longer use the index. However, AltaVista and FAST, obviously, do.

    MSN Search now uses Microsoft's own search engine, index and crawler (MSN formerly used the Inktomi index). MSN claims their crawler, MSNBot, indexes most pages on the Internet without them being formally submitted. If your site is not already appearing in MSN search results, you presumably only need to submit your top-level page. If some pages are not showing up in search results, you can submit them separately also.

Other Crawlers:
    Singingfish Multimedia Search was been acquired, and killed, by AOL (Time-Warner).

    You may find your website being crawled by "ia-archiver", which appears to handle frames correctly. This is Alexa, a toolbar site-description browser plug-in. They do not accept submissions.

Search engines that do NOT appear to list new submissions:
    whatUseek requires your URL and email, and makes no claim regarding how soon you will be listed. Their crawler is called "Winona", and we have never seen it in our stats, despite several submissions. They do send me their advertising-packed newsletter frequently, however.

  Paid Search Engines ( Pay Per Click, PPC or CPC ):

    Once known as GoTo.com and more recently as Overture, Yahoo! Sponsored Search is the leading paid search engine. They place their top 3 listings for all keywords at the top of Yahoo!'s results. Yahoo! Search Marketing (when it was called Overture) acquired AltaVista, and FAST (alltheweb.com), so their paid results will always appear on those search engines. Their listings also appear on CNN, America Online, Lycos, Hotbot, Netscape, CNET and many others, reaching 85% of all Internet users. Of course, you only pay for the traffic you actually receive.

    Originally known as FindWhat, MIVA is Yahoo! Sponsored Search's leading competitor.

About search engines that do not accept free submissions:
    Euroseek is not currently accepting site submissions. And like many other search engines recently, Go.com (InfoSeek), Excite and Canada.com have all abandoned their own indexes, and substituted paid search (often provided by Yahoo! Search Marketing). Thus, you can no longer submit your site to Go.com, Excite, or Canada.com.

    Direct Hit was acquired by Teoma, which was acquired by Ask Jeeves. They accept only paid submissions.

    WiseNut, which had been owned by Samsung, was acquired by LookSmart--who killed it, to the advantage of Google, Yahoo...

  Directory Submissions:

    The DMOZ Open Directory is used for browsing by Lycos, HotBot, Google, and numerous other sites. It is extremely important to get listed on, and can also be rather difficult. You need to select a category first, and then click on 'Add URL' on THAT page. But some categories have NO "Add URL" link!
    When you do find a category you wish to submit to, they require your URL, site title, a 25 to 30 word site description, and your email. It takes from 2 weeks to several months to get listed, if you ever will. Don't resubmit for at least 3 weeks.

    Like DMOZ, with the Yahoo Directory you need to select a category first, and then click on "Suggest a Site" on THAT page. There is no guarantee you will be listed, unless you pay for a listing through the fee-based Yahoo! Directory Submit submission process. And free submissions to the Yahoo! directory are now available only for non-commercial sites.

Galaxy, one of the first directories on the Internet, now is presented as a free classified ad directory.

    The Jayde Directory, now repackaged as a business-to-business search site, still appears to accept free submissions.

  More Search Engine Information:

The Web Robots Pages contain info on crawlers in general and list most known web robots.

Search Engine World has information and tools to boost search engine rankings.

WebMasterWorld Forums cover many topics, including search engines.