I’m a search engine tragic.

It often happens to people who create websites. We can’t resist checking multiple search engines to see how they are ranking on each one. We tweak the code, the content, check out the competitors, build link campaigns, all for the holy grail of a good position on page one at a major search engine, especially if it’s Google. And when we get there, we keep going back, to see if it’s still there, and who we have to worry about.

But there is no such thing as the perfect search engine. They’re all open to manipulation by webmasters and advertisers vying for that top position. That’s why the search engines have to keep tweaking their algorithms, to stop black-hat SEOers and spammers and rich jerks from monopolising the top results. I’ve seen ads for software programs (and these are just the ones clean enough to be advertised), to automatically create hundreds of websites and blogs each day, scraping content from article directories, other websites and blogs and feeds and shopping sites, then automatically pasting Google Adsense ads, Clickbank links, affiliate links, Chikita malls onto the site to make it earn money.

When you see the number one site at say Google, it may be what you want, or it may just be one created by a webmaster who also happened to create 100 blogs that all have a link back to it, making it appear popular enough to be seen as the most relevant.

So even the big search engines have seen that temporarily being seen as the best search engine is not enough. Even Google is providing extra “treats” to make us keep coming back.

The next pages will show some of the extra features you may not be using yet at your favourite search engine.