What is search engine
Through this article, we will know what is Search Engine and how does it work? Friends, ever since internet was born, we get easy answers to all our questions. Whatever information is needed, just search the Internet and in few seconds relevant results will be in front of you. But you have ever wondered who brings that information to us.
Yes, SEARCH ENGINE is the medium that helps us to find information on the web. Millions of websites exist on the Internet and they all provide some information for us. But just think, if there was no search engine, then how would you know on which website you would get the information about that specific topic.
So if you are interested in knowing what is a search engine? What are search engines? How do search engines work? What is the importance of search engines? Just read this post till the end and you will get the answers to all the questions. Let’s start the post with the definition of search engine.
Table of contents
What is search engine
The search engine is a web based tool or software that helps internet users to search information on the World Wide Web. For example Google, Bing, Yahoo, Baidu and Yandex are popular search engines. When the user types a word in the search bar, it is called Keyword. Based on these keywords and key phrases, search engines display long list of web results to the user.
In the form of search engine website link, image and video that show us the list of results (content list), that page is called Search engine result page (SERP). For example, before reaching this page of our website, you must have searched on Google search engine by typing “What is a search engine”. The word search engine written in this case is a Keyword. From which search engines find out what the user wants to know about.
The rest of the sentence is called Key phrase, which helps google or other search engine to show the best match result. So overall Search Engine is a service that we can access through the Internet. It searches that information from the information database based on the query of the user and puts such results in front of us using its algorithm. In which we could get the exact result of our questions.
Top 5 search engines in India
Internet is an important part of our daily life in today’s time and the search engine is the backbone of the Internet. You can access every information on the Internet through search engines. So, let us now tell you about some popular search engines in India, which you might have also used.
Top 5 Search engine list
There is no doubt that Google is the most used search engine in the world. There are about 63000 searches per second in Google. Just think how many times per second is searched, what will be the number of days and whole year. If you look at this number, then there are about 2 trillion searches per year in Google. Google was started in 1997 by American computer scientist Larry Page and Sergey Brin.
Google has about 92.81% share of the search engine market share, the biggest reason for Google becoming popular is its information database, search for anything, you will get the answer immediately.
Bing
Bing is made by Microsoft. It was started in 2009 by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. After Google, Bing comes second in the list of popular search engines. Microsoft replaced bing with its old search engines Live search and MSN search. Bing is often seen as a competitor to Google.
But in reality there is no comparison between these two. Bing occupies the second position with about 2.38% share of the search engine market share.
Yahoo
Yahoo is also a well-known name in the world’s largest search engine. Apart from being a search engine and portal, Yahoo also provides many other services. yahoo mail is the most popular of these. Compared with google, yahoo is not able to show that fast and exact result and probably it is not so preferable as a search engine.
AOL.COM
AOL is an American web portal and online service provider company. Although AOL search engine is not used much in India, but according to Hindi search it is a great search engine. There are lakhs of Hindi websites and blogs present in it, which provide you information in Hindi language. It is considered to be about 0.06% share in the search engine market.
Yandex
Yandex has the status of Russia’s most popular search engine. Just as google is a shadow in India, Yandex is famous in Russia. It was started in 1997 by Arkady valozh and Arkady Borkovsky. Apart from search engine, it also provides many other services. Its market share in India is only 0.01%. Searching for information on Yandex is as easy as Google.
How the search engine works
Let us understand what is a search engine? But even more interestingly, how do search engines work? Whenever you search by typing a keyword or key phrase in the search box. So how is it able to show us the exact result. This work is done in three phase by the search engine. In which Crawling is the first Indexing second and Retrieval is the third step. Let’s understand a little about these three.
What are the three primary functions of search engines?
1) Search Engine Crawling
Crawling is a search process in which a new or old website is scanned by the search engine. Robot (also called crawler and spider) is used to perform this task. These spiders search the content of a website through its link. Their job is to scan the website and collect detail about every page of the website.
Spiders scan the title, url image, keywords of a web page to find out what the web page is about. If many other web page links are found in that page, then spiders reach the next page with the help of that link and start scanning it. This is how millions of webpages are scanned through Automated bot links. If considered by some intellectuals then Google crawler can scan thousands of web pages in a second.
2) Search Engine Indexing
Once the crawler scans a web-page, then the process of indexing starts. The crawled data is stored in the database. A sufficient number of servers are placed at this database center, which store all copies of the web page being created by the crawler. This repository of web page is called index.
This is the data that you see as a search result while searching for information in the search engine. This is the process of arranging the mass of data and web pages, so that the search engine can quickly find the relevant result for your search query.
3) Search Engine Ranking and Retrieval
The third and final stage is Ranking. In this, the search engine processes the query we searched and puts such relevant pages in front of us, in which we can find the right answer to our question. The web page that we see most in the search result is the most relevant for your query according to the search engine. Now the question is, how does Google or any other search engine decide that the web page ranked in the first number is better than the second number.
For this, the Ranking Algorithm is resorted to. Each search engine may have a different Ranking method. All search engines keep their algorithm a secret, so that no web creator comes up incorrectly using those algorithms. But web makers try to use SEO (Search engine optimization) to bring their web page ahead of others.
Types of search engines
Today the search engine has become a great tool for us to search for information. To know about a topic, you do not need to find resources, just put the topic on the search engine, you will have all the websites that give information about that. There are different types of search engines to get the information you search.
Search engines are classified into the following three categories.
- Crawler Based Search Engines
- Directories
- Hybrid Search Engine
- Crawler
All crawler based search engines use spiders, crawler, robot and bot programs to crawl and index new content in the database. Before showing any website in search results, it follows four steps, crawling, indexing, calculating relevancy and retrieving result. These types of search engines are most useful.
Crawler Based Search Engine Example:
Bing
Yahoo
- Directories
The web directory, which we also know as the subject directory, is a type of directory system. In this, a list of websites is given on the basis of category and a small description of what the website is about is also given. The owner of the website submits his website to these directories himself. There is also a search box in these directories. By putting your query on which you will get links to websites which are giving information about this. This type of search engine is fully human driven.
Directory Based Search Engine Example:
Yahoo directory
DMOZ
Botw
- Hybrids
It is a mixture of Crawler and directory based search engines. Google or other crawler based search engines use crawler as primary system and directories as second system. Search engines coming in this category can show you the details of the webpage in their results from both crawler and directory. This is a good option where you can get human driven results and crawler results on the same search engine.
But nowadays human based directories are disappearing, due to which now hybrid search engine has become completely crawler based.
Hybrid Based Search Engine:
Yahoo
Conclusion
In this article we learned what is Search Engine and how does it work? If you are a blogger, in order to rank your website in google or other search engines, you should know about the working of these search engines so that you can make your website compatible with them. In this post, we have not only told about the search engine but also have given complete information about its examples and how it works.