There is so much hype about PR and google SEO - but how does one go about getting up those SERPS for the other engines such as Overture and MSN? Google might be the biggest alone, but I'm sure that it can't defeat by far all of the others put together? I've tried Overture PPC but haven't found it very beneficial.

Overture has a good network size, but your techi theme and audience is more likely to search on google than some of the other search sites...its the same reason why I sell a ton more of my ebooks from google than other search engines... the audience appeals to that user experience.

as far as the other search engines teoma / ask jeeves is a clustering engine which means you need links from lots of related websites, but they dont get much search volume and throw tons of ads on top of the ask jeeves search results.

msn and yahoo are the only other two major search engines. keyword rich content and bulk variety keyword rich links even from off topic sites work well for improving your relevancy for them.

I agree. I think for a number of years now, 'search wise' surfers use Google far more. Less savvy searchers would use Yahoo or believe Ask Jeeves would actually answer their 'questions'!