Some of them will have you listed within a few days, but others seem totally bogged down, in spite of my trying to get my site updated at least weekly for several months. I've also finally managed to get listed with HotBot, WebCrawler and Lycos but the cycle seems to be at best indeterminate. Whether you get listed now or next month, you need to do a bit more with your pages to help your site show up higher in searches for your kind of products or services. The following tips seem to work well. Y ahoo is a special case, and you may never get listed because it's not a search engine, it's a directory.
Every entry is made by a human being rather than a robot.
And if you do get listed, it won't necessarily do you much good. After six months, I got human intervention and am listed but my site title and description don't have any of the keywords I provided in them since Yahoo rewrites submissions and stripped all of them out. F or the search engines, first determine the words your prospects will use for their searches. A good way to start is by looking up your competitors using InfoSeek and Yahoo to find out what categories they're in, then using those categories as keywords. Go and Inktomi will index these, and they are used as the engines for a number of other search sites.