The key search engines that you need to be aware of are (ranked in order of priority):

• Google (www.google.com)
   
  Google is the biggest and most popular search engine on the Internet. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, as of June 2004, Google is being used by 41.6% of users on the Net!

• Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)
   
  Yahoo is the second-largest search engine and offers a wide range of other value-add services too. Nielsen/NetRatings reports, as of June 2004, that Yahoo is being used by 31.5% of users on the Net.

• MSN Search (www.msnsearch.com)
   
  MSN Search is the third-largest search engine. MSN Search is very popular because it is provided as the default search engine when using Microsoft Windows. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, MSN Search is used by 27.4% of all users (remember some users use more than one search engine).

• SearchNZ (www.searchnz.co.nz)
   
  SearchNZ is a specialty search engine for finding New Zealand websites.

 
 
The key directories that you need to be aware of are (ranked in order of priority):

• Open Directory Project (www.dmoz.org)
   
  The Open Directory Project is a free directory maintained by 65,000 volunteer editors (as at September 2004). The ODP is used by Google and some smaller search engines to provide directory results for their customers.

• Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)
   
  Yahoo originally started as a commercial directory before becoming a predominately crawler-based search engine in late 2002. The Yahoo Directory is maintained by a number of paid editorial staff and the results are used within Yahoo Search and many other search engines affiliated with Yahoo.

 
 
The following are currently the key NZ-based directories; they maintain their listings using paid editorial staff that ensure that the coded key words and phrases are indeed relevant search-wise to your product or service before adding to the directory:

• NZSearch (www.nzsearch.co.nz)

• NZS (www.nzs.co.nz)

• NZPages (www.nzpages.co.nz)