The once robust world of Internet search engines has shrunk to only two that really matter (for English speakers): Google and Bing.

Search Submissions (direct links to site submission pages):

Search engines that really do crawl and index entire websites:

Google says:

"The simplest way to submit your new and updated URLs is to register your site and app with Search Console. After you register, use the Sitemaps report to see which sitemaps were processed for your site, any processing errors, or to submit a new sitemap for your site. For help with the Sitemaps report, see the Sitemaps report in the Search Console help center."

Site Map Generator Tools

The Google crawler is called Googlebot.

"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... by Ian Rogers | Google PigeonRank (April Fools Day 2002)

MSN Bing Search no longer accepts anonymous URL submissions. To submit a site you must register and log in to Bing Webmaster Tools.

Bing uses Microsoft's own search engine, index and crawler (MSN formerly used the Inktomi index). MSN claimed their crawler, MSNBot, indexed most pages on the Internet without them being formally submitted. MSNbot was later replaced by bingbot. 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.

Yandex is now the #1 search engine in Russia, its home country, with over 50% of the market. But in the United States and most other nations outside Russia, it garners less than 1% of the market. To submit a site you must register and log in to Yandex Webmaster.

What Happened to Yahoo!?

Yahoo! no longer accepts search engine submissions (and their original browsable directory no longer exists).

In early 2003 Yahoo! bought Inktomi, whose search index powered HotBot, MSN, and other search engines, for $235 million. Until then, Yahoo! had been using Google search results. Slurp, "Inktomi's Web Robot" became "Yahoo!'s Web Crawler". Yahoo's takeover of Inktomi devalued the index somewhat; MSN, Lycos, and Hotbot stopped using the Inktomi index.

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! killed the AltaVista and FAST search engines they had acquired in the Overture purchase.

Having purchased Inktomi for $235 million, Yahoo! stopped using the index. In July, 2009, Yahoo! entered into a 10 year contract with Microsoft to use MSN's "Bing" search engine instead. And now Yahoo! Search Marketing has also disappeared, meaning that Yahoo! spent a total of $1,855,000,000 on search engines which they later discarded.

Search engines that are dead, or do not accept free submissions:

Lycos and Hotbot still exist, but do not state who is actually providing their search index, and do not provide a way to add your URL to their index.

Direct Hit was acquired by Teoma, which was acquired by Ask Jeeves (now Ask). Teoma and Ask exist, but no longer accept submissions.

WiseNut, which had been owned by Samsung, was acquired by LookSmart--who killed it, to the advantage of Google & Bing. LookSmart itself is now just another pseudo-search engine purchasing search results from Microsoft or Google.

Singingfish Multimedia Search was acquired, and then killed, by AOL (Time-Warner).

Other Crawlers

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.

Directory Submissions:

Once a search engine, Euroseek is now a directory charging a fee ($149 per annum or $299 lifetime) for listings.

The DMOZ Open Directory which was used for browsing by Google, and some other sites, is dead, slthough it still can be used as a static link archive.

Like DMOZ, the Yahoo Directory is dead.

Galaxy, one of the first directories on the Internet, is also dead.

The Jayde Directory, now repackaged as a business-to-business search site, still appears to accept free submissions--but also appears to be almost dead.

More Search Engine Information:

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

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

WebMasterWorld Forums cover many topics, including search engines.

Search Engine Submissions and Directory Submissions ( Search Submissions - Submit URL )

webdev.quickfound.net