Article Contents
Introduction
A search engine is a web-based tool (referred to as robots, bots, spiders or web crawlers) that enables users to locate information on the World Wide Web. The search engines search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The information gathered by the spiders is used to create a searchable index of the Web. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files. Internet content that is not capable of being searched by a web search engine is generally described as the deep web.
A search engine is accessed through a browser app on either a computer, smartphone, tablet, or other devices. Today, most new browser apps used an omnibox, which is a text box at the top of the browser. The omnibox allows users to type in a URL or a search query.
Search Engines
Five (5) Top Examples of Popular Search Engines
Google has been the number one search engines all over the World in terms of popularity for years. However, their ranking are as follows:
- Google
Google is a fully-automated search engine that uses software known as "web crawlers" that explore the web on a regular basis to find sites and add them to their index. Google was owned by its parent company Alphabet, handling over 8.5 billion searches per day. Google has a 91.56% share of the global search engine market. It is the most-visited website in the World.<
The order of search results returned by Google is based, in part, on a priority rank system called "PageRank". Google Search also provides many different options for customized searches, using symbols to include, exclude, specify or require certain search behaviour, and also offers specialized interactive experiences, such as flight status and package tracking, weather forecasts, currency, unit, and time conversions, word definitions, and much more.
Google Search Engine
- Microsoft Bing
Microsoft Bing formerly known simply as Bing, is a web search engine owned and operated by Microsoft. The service has its origins in Microsoft's previous search engines: MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search. Bing provides a variety of search services, including web, video, image and map search products. Bing was increasingly used in Microsoft products like Cortana.
Bing is the second most popular search engine worldwide, with a 3.03% market share as of September 2023. Bing search engine gets more than 1 billion visits each month.
Bing Search Box
- YANDEX
Yandex (Яндекс in Russian, from the term “Yet Another iNDEXer”) is a search engine that is popular mostly in the eastern countries. It belongs to the Russian multinational of the same name specializing in services and products relating to the internet, its URL is Yandex.ru. It is Google’s main competitor in Russia and in other countries within its sphere by number of visits received and market penetration, with a market share of around 60% in Russia. Yandex has 1.81% of the overall world search engine market share. Like Google, Yandex offers free e-mail, real-time traffic maps, music, videos, photo storage, and other services. It also has its own voice assistant (Alice), its driverless car is undergoing testing, and it has a platform for the management of sponsored advertisements, Yandex Direct.
Yandex Search Box
- Yahoo!
Yahoo is a popular website, email provider and the fourth biggest search engine in the world with almost 1.24% of the overall search engine market share. Yahoo! Search is a rebadged version of the Bing search engine owned by Yahoo!, headquartered in Sunnyvale, California.
Once a very popular and dominant search engine, Yahoo was dropping in value over the years and became somewhat overshadowed by Google, and recently by bing and Baidu.
Yahoo! Search Box
- Baidu
Baidu (meaning "hundred times") search engine was owned by Baidu Inc. It is a Chinese multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products and artificial intelligence (AI), headquartered in Beijing's Haidian District. Baidu is the most dominant search engine in China. Even though its overall worldwide market share is 1 percent, it represents over 80 percent of the market share in China with billions of searches every day.
Baidu was incorporated in January 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu. Baidu has origins in RankDex, an earlier search engine developed by Robin Li in 1996, before he founded Baidu in 2000.
Baidu Search Box
Note! All the search engines market share index used here was generated from the statCounter GlobalStats reports of September, 2023. https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
How Search Engines Work?
Search engines can differ from one to another in their ways of providing the answers to the user, but all of them are built upon three (3) fundamental principles, these includes:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Ranking
- Crawling
The actual discovery of new webpages on the internet starts with the process called crawling. Search engines use small programs called web crawlers (sometimes called bots or spiderbots) that follow links from already known pages to the new ones that need to be discovered.
Every time a web crawler finds a new webpage through a link, it scans and passes its content for further processing (called indexing) and continues in the discovery of new webpages. - Indexing
Once the bots crawl the data, it’s time for indexing; the process of validating and storing the content from the webpages in the search engine’s database called “index”. It is basically a big library of all the websites. Index can contain hundreds of billions of webpages, stored in an index database library.
Your website has to be indexed in order to be displayed on the search engine results page. Keep in mind that both crawling and indexing are continuous processes that take place over and over again to keep the database fresh.
Once the webpage is analysed and saved in the index, it can be used as a search result for a potential search query. - Ranking
The last step on how search engines work includes picking the best results and creating a list of pages that will appear on the result page.
Every search engine uses dozens of ranking signals and most of them are kept as a secret, unavailable to the public.
There is an exception. Every search engine uses different complex mathematical formulas and has a proprietary algorithm to generate search results. The results for a specific query are then displayed on the SERP. Search engine algorithms take the key elements of a web page, including the page title, content and keyword density, and come up with a ranking for where to place the results on the pages. Each search engine’s algorithm is unique, so a top ranking on bing does not guarantee a prominent ranking on Google, and vice versa. To make things more complicated, the algorithms used by search engines are not only closely guarded secrets, they are also constantly undergoing modification and revision. This means that the criteria to best optimize a site with, must be derived through observation, as well as trial and error — and not just once, but continuously.
The first internet search engine was Archie Query Form introduced in 1990. It was a tool that searched for file transfer protocol (FTP) sites and provided them in the form of a list. The Archie Query Form did not include any further details on the content been searched. The search engine that brought the basic principle of backlinks when carrying out a search on the Internet and laid the foundation of PageRank algorithm was called BackRub, which was introduced in 1996. This principle of backlinks was used to this day. Google was launched in 1998 as a successor of BackRub, and over the years became the most popular and dominant search engine in the world.
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