Google, Bing and Yahoo have most of the search engine market. Google of course owns most of it. The other ones, do they even matter?

I went through this SE list. Many of those search engines I have never heard of.

I am assuming Baidu would bring you a lot of traffic if you had chinese website. There was also a mentioning about Ask.

How do you think the other more specialised/niche search engines such as:

• Geographical limited scope or
• Education

rank in terms of providing traffic to your sites?

They don't seem to play a very big role but it never hurts to submit to them. Google and other bigger SE's sometimes have a look through what the smaller ones have indexed. Can't hurt your site at all so it's worth the few clicks to submit them in my opinion.

Submitting to these small search engines will give you minimal amount of traffic. The small niche search engines might give you more targeted traffic, therefore better conversion.

SEO for google, and other search engines will follow.

Yeah, in SEO, google has always been the basis followed by yahoo and other search engines. Once you're website ranked good in google then it is expected that your website will rank to other search engines too.