I remember when I first started my personal website, I was just desperate to get it picked up by Google. It consumed me: I'd check every day (fortunately, Google has a "don't bug us more than once" policy, because otherwise, I'd totally bug them all th time.)

Richard Hoy at Writers Weekly tells those of you with the new sites what you need to hear: register yourself once or twice and then forget about it. It's not worth your time to try to get picked up by anybody other than Google or MSN (I believe that if you get picked up by Google you get picked up by Yahoo!) anyway. No amount of cajoling will make it happen more quickly, either.