IITian - 4:29 pm on Jul 2, 2004 (gmt 0)

Am I unhappy about this, you betcha! Because I am not in the top 5? PARTIALLY. I am mostly upset at the fact that all other SE known to humankind have ranked me in the top 5, but somehow "THE NEW" MSN has determined that 86 other websites are a better match and roughly 30% of them have nothing at all to do with making widgets in my state on the "new & improved" MSN. My site contains NO spam, tricks, cloaking, keyword loading, and consise and honest METAS. I have take years building honest links and developing content specific to my industry. So now I get to spend countless (unbillable) hours trying to accomodate ONE search engine that wants to be different.

I think you should be happy with the top five positions on other SEs. Unless your site is the brand name searched for, I would say that these top 5 positions most likely don't indicate the relevance but rather the amount of work you have put on your site. As a searcher who is looking for cheap widgets, I will be happy to get a one page site offering really cheap widgets rather than seeing a 100,000 page site that has existed for many years, building and buying links, and amount of SEO work done on them, and not offering really that cheap widgets.

If all the SEs gave the same results, then there is no need for more than one SE. Instead, different serps help non-SEOed sites by letting some of them be in the top 10.