Greek39, the “lesser” search engines agressively crawl the web and indexes anything they can find. Once you are listed with iWon or a range of other smaller SEs of that sort, you will be listed with them all – it’s their way of keeping up with the larger competition. It’ a matter of how long they take to find you.
You would not have to be on a paid SE for them to find you. Most likely, one of those smaller SEs were on a list of one of the free search engine services we sometimes use – you know the ones, where they will submit your URL for free to a handful of search engines, but for $$$ they will submit to 150.
Or you could have submitted your URL for free to only one small search engine which was crawled by the others.
These smaller SEs do not have webmasters begging to get listed like DMOZ, Yahoo, MSN and Google do…. they maintain their large information bases by hunting for content. Webmasters can speed up the process by submitting their URL directly to iWon or other similar SE, and they will all be sharing in no time.
Something I rarely see mentioned – getting included to these smaller SEs by way of free URL submission establishes in-coming links for the larger SEs to pick up on. Paid advertising or mass link exchanges is such a waste of time and $ which could be better used by slowly and methodically hand-submitting URLs.
Hope I explained this clearly rather than add more confusion. :satisfied And congratulations on being all over the web!
…Andrea