Definition of Search Engines –

Every Search Engine purpose is to facilitate the user to finds information on a website or page. Search Engines are answer machines.

It would take days rather than seconds to find an answer to a question without the help of a search engine.

Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo have two major functions: (1) to crawl and index the web, (2) to provide users with meaningful results to their queries.

When it comes to digital marketing, the search seems nearly synonymous with Google. This major search engine dominates the market.

It’s not mean that other search engines don’t deserve consideration. Google holds a powerful around 70% of the search market. But local search engines can outnumber Google in China, Russia, and South Korea.

Search engines have created automated software programs called robots, bots, or spiders which index the words on webpages.

When a user inputs a search term and then search engine attempts to match the term to categories or keywords in its catalog or www websites. The search engine generates a list of websites which match the search criteria ranked as per relevance.

Search engines are web-based tools, and each search engine can be used to search for a specific document, guides, tutorials, images, videos, or any product to buy.

All information would be a word-of-mouth type of information, and nothing new could be discovered without the help of a search engine.

A search engine takes the individual into consideration and pre-determines what they would like to search. It can be influenced by the popularity of a website:

• the search trends,
• the authority of the website,
• Own personal preferences that the search engine automatically detects through your input.

It’s important for a search engine to deliver a satisfactory result to the searcher and responsibility to do fairly.

The moment a search engine gives biased results it loose credibility and searchers will stop using it. There are generally four main aspects of an effective search result:-

# Crawling – The crawler or web spider is an important software component of the search engine. It finds website addresses and the contents of a website for storage in the search engine database.

Crawling can search for a wide range of websites and collect large amounts of information simultaneously.

# Indexing – Once the search engine has crawled the contents of the Internet, it indexes that content based on the keyword phrase. A keyword phrase is a particular group of words used to search for a specific topic.

The indexing excludes any unnecessary and common articles like the, a, and an. After that, it stores the content in an organized way for quick access.

Few less popular Internet search engines work in real-time and don’t use indexing but display search results as they are found.

# Storage – Storing web content within the database is crucial for fast and easy searching. Large search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo can store large amounts of data and offer a larger source of information available for the user.

# Search Results – Search results are the hyperlinks to websites that shows-up in the search engine page when a user enter any certain keyword or phrase.

When you type any search term, the crawler finds through the index and matches with your typed keywords. A simple search produces hundreds of thousands of hits and a relevant document appears on the screen as a result.

Search engines algorithms are used to provide the most relevant data. The search engine also consider the following factors when ranking a page:-

• When the page was published
• If the page includes text, pictures, or video
• Quality of the content
• How well content matches the user’s query
• Website page load speed
• Backlinks from other websites point to that content
• Social signals or sharing the website’s content on social media channels

How Search Engine Operate –

When a search engine provides you an answer in response to a query, then they first crawled billions of website.

Search engine builds an index and stores it in their sophisticated and fast database program to be retrieved at a later time through a user search.

Once the search is complete, the search engine will present you with pages and listing websites believe to be the most relevant to your query.

The page in front of you is called search engine results page (SERPs) and it’ll contain a list of websites with their respective title and description. There are thousands of search engines help people to find the way on the Internet.

Many search engines are created through an automated process in which a program called a spider which crawls across the web to gather information about existing websites.

The spider gathers the basic information and organizes its findings into categories which are then used to generate search results for users.

But Yahoo listings are prepared by real people who actually look at each website, analyze the content, and assign it to various classifications. Yahoo continuously seeks out new websites to include in its listings.

Effects of Search Engines –

Search engines are instruments to serve as a means to surf the Internet as well as provide a market placement within the respective competitive field.

A business who can’t be found via a search engine will find it hard to generate new clients in a time where everyone using a search engine to get information.

Search engines are generating billions in turnover worldwide and everyone participates financially in this competition.

The History of Search Engines –

The goal of all search engines is to found and organize distributed data found on the Internet.

Before the development of a search engine, the Internet was a collection of File Transfer Protocol (FTP) websites in which users would navigate to find specific files.

As the central list of web servers joining the Internet development and the WWW (World Wide Web) become the interface of choice for accessing the Internet. Search engines started to easily navigate the web servers and files on the Internet.

An American engineer and scientist Vannevar Bush published an article in The Atlantic Monthly (1945) for the need of search engine. It was emphasizing the necessity to get all information far beyond our ability to make real use of the record.

# WHOIS – The WHOIS protocol debuted in 1982 and was one of the first tools used to query database over the Internet. WHOIS searches were very powerful and it could be used to locate a large scale of information.

Today, WHOIS search parameters are much more limited. It’s used to locate the registered owner of a single resource or to locate the privacy service ownership of a single resource.

The web directories and search engines gained popularity in the 1990s and developed a method of Internet search.

# Excite (1993) – It was developed by six undergraduate students of Stanford University in a project Architext. It was developed for the statistical analysis of word relationships to improve the relevancy of searches on the Internet. This project led to commercial release as a crawling search engine at the end of 1995.

# Yahoo (1994) – It was a highly regarded and largest human-compiled directory in existence. It provided an extensive listing of websites supported by a network of regional directories. In 2001, Yahoo started charging a fee for its directory listing.

# WebCrawler (1994) – It was the first search engine to provide full-text search. Brian Pinkerton, computer science and engineering student at the University of Washington use his spare time to create WebCrawler.

Only a month later, Brian announced the release of WebCrawler live on the web with a database of 4000 websites. With a year, it was fully operational on advertising revenue.

# Ask (1997) – It was developed by Garret Gruener and David Warthen (earlier known as Ask Jeeves). Originally human editors listed the prominent websites along with paid listings and results pulled from partner websites. Today, with weightage on the paid listing, Ask struggles for market share against Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

# Google (1997) – Stanford Ph.D. students Larry Page and Sergey Bring began researching the concept of a search engine based on relevancy ranking.

They developed a search engine nicknamed BackRub which checked the number and quality of links coming back to websites to check the value of a website.

Their research led them to develop the trademark PageRank link analysis algorithm that Google’s search engine would be used to assign a numerical weighting to hyperlinked document elements.

# Bing (1998) – It was a service offered as part of Microsoft’s network of web service. It’s a replacement of old MSN Search product. Microsoft launched Internet Explorer as a bunch part of their operating system and software products.

MSN Search was renamed as Windows Live in 2006. Internet Explorer’s integrated search toolbar to use its default index which ensures a steady flow of searches.

# Ixquick.com (1998) – It’s a metasearch engine which offers a proxy service for Ixquick and an email service that offer privacy protection called StartMail.

Ixquick doesn’t record IP addresses and only use one cookie which is set to remember the user’s search preferences for future searches. It’ll be removed once a user doesn’t return to the search engine after 3 months.

# DuckDuckGo (2006) – This search engine doesn’t store or share any information about the user. It provides all users the same results for a given search term. It provides search results from best sources rather than most sources.

# Yandex (1997) – It stands for Yet Another Indexer. It’s the largest search engine in Russia and ranked as the 4^th largest search engine in the world. It’s serving over 150 million searches per day.

# Baidu (2000) – It’s one of the main search engines in China. It locates information, products, and services through Chinese language search terms. It provides advanced searches, snapshots, spells checker, news, images, videos, space information, weather, and other local information.

Categories of Search Engines –

Search engines are a program that searches documents or visuals too for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents with keywords. Search engines are generally categorized into three types as:-

# Crawler-based Search Engines – These search engines are good when you have a specific search topic and can be very efficient in finding relevant information in this situation.

Google, Alta Vista, and All The Web are crawler-based search engines which create their listings automatically by using a piece of software called crawler or spider.

The spider visits a webpage, read it, and follows links to other pages within the website. The spider returns to the website on a regular basis to look for changes.

The spider finds and sent out the webpage’s text to index. An index is a catalog which is a copy of every webpage. It’ll be updated when webpage changes.

These search engines may return hundreds of thousands of irrelevant response to simple search requests including lengthy documents in which keyword appears only once.

# Human-Powered Directories – These are good when you’re interested in a general topic of search. These are more relevant to the search topic and accurate. Yahoo, Look Smart, and Open Directory depend on human editors to create their listings.

You can submit a short description to the directory for your entire website. Editors will review, and manually edit the descriptions to form the search base.

The changes made to individual webpages will have no effect on search results after the pages get listed. It’s not an efficient way to find information with a specific search topic.

# Meta Search Engines – These search engines can save your time by searching only in one place and cautious about the need to use and learn from several search engines.

Metacrawler, Dogpile, and Mamma send out the keywords simultaneously to several individual search engines to carry out the search.

Search results returned from all the search engines can be integrated, and duplicity will be eliminated. Some additional features such as clustering by subjects within the search results can be implemented.

Search Engines Use Artificial Intelligence –

When you type a query in a few keywords and then the search engine began the hunt for the entire Internet to find the most relevant content. Then it’s not magic and it’s an algorithm.

In past few SEO specialists used black hat SEO techniques which include aggressive keyword stuffing, and invisible text. It’s damaging to search engine because the top of the pages was low quality.

Search engines have updated their algorithms and use AI to take apart high-quality content from the low-quality spam. Artificial Intelligence protects search engine from manipulation and also helps in ranking algorithms.

AI progress will take over the responsibility and remove the need for human quality raters entirely. Search engines are computer applications and they need to understand human language to find users’ information on the Internet.

It’s a textbook application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) which is a part of Artificial Intelligence to teach computers to understand the written language.

Conclusion – Search Engines have become the main tool for people to get online information. Search engines are constantly required to enhance their quality and quantity of information. Search engines are becoming more intelligent, and relevant with quality content which is a top-ranking factor. It means that the best and most relevant content will win.