But despite the initial cleanup, malware pages soon crept back into search results and had to be banned again, says Thomas.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The little brethren of these search giants range from search marketers and optimizers, who advise companies how to design their sites to maximize their rankings on a search results page, to companies that provide the back-office functions to services like Yahoo!

FORBES: Chief Executive Eric Schmidt

By creating content with popular terms and linking back to it from legitimate ranked sites, the rules search engines like Google use to prioritize results are subverted.

FORBES: The Proliferation Of Scareware Hits Home

Search engine marketing consultant and blogger Rand Fishkin recently compiled a list of more than 70 sites with names like LinksFactory.net and DirectoryDump.com, which have been relegated in the past three weeks to the hardly seen back pages of Google's results, even when users search for them by name.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Another difference: After being dogged by privacy advocates, Google now anonymizes search results -- making them difficult, if not impossible, to trace back to an individual user -- after nine months.

CNN: IBM worries iPhone's Siri has loose lips

Donato's Oodle already scrapes search results from more than 75, 000 other classifieds sites, makes them searchable and links back to the original sites.

FORBES: Un-Classified Data