Small European search engines and others are unlikely to randomly crawl your sites. You have to bring your site to their attention. If everyone relied exclusively on big search engines for traffic, this World Wide Web would not be a net – just a one-way toll road.
Even MSN offers automated multiple search-engine submissions (but please note that their service is not free). See for example http://search.microsoft.com/search/results.aspx'st=b&View=en-us&s=8&c=0&qu=submit or http://submitit.bcentral.com/subcats2.htm
Why would Microsoft automate submissions to various engines, directories, and services if those services picked up on everything the big search engines indexed? And why would German and Dutch engines pay much attention to English directories? Anyway, who says the whole world can’t submit to foreign-language search engines? And who says anyone is completely reliant on quick fixes? Most people utilize various services and techniques. For example, Google may index DMOZ but DMOZ does not index Google. DMOZ is run by human editors who manually choose sites. The BBC in England has a search engine/directory run by human editors, too. They found one of my sites through a press release — not from Google or Yahoo, etc.
And if being listed on FFA’s spells doom for a site, then we are all doomed: any stranger can submit any site to any FFA from anywhere in the world. Who’s to say the aliens aren’t busy submitting your site to 100s of thousands of FFAs right this second.
We can’t label the various sectors — the Internet is too complex for generalizations.
