Every user has no need for lots of search engines. If the user isn’t professionally involved in digital marketing he just wants such a search engine that would deliver relevant results, a simple interface, and accessible options to be able to tighten or broaden his search. Put it otherwise, the typical user needs a search engine that will meet 99% of his searching need.
What is Search Engines?
A search engine is an online platform that searches for results in their database based on the search query (keyword: like you are searching for a “shoes”) submitted by the internet user. The results are usually websites that semantically match with the search query.
Search engines find the results in their database, sort them and make an ordered list of these results based on the search algorithm. This list is generally called the search engine results page (SERP).
There are many search engines on the market, while the most widely used is Google. Many website browsers such as Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge usually come with a default search engine set as a home page or starting page.
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How do search engines work?
There may be some differences in how the search engines work but the fundamentals remain the same. Each of them has to do the following tasks:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Creating results
1. Crawling :
Search engines have their own crawlers, small bots that scan websites on the world wide web. These little bots scan all sections, folders, subpages, content, everything they can find on the website.
Crawling is based on finding hypertext links that refer to other websites. By parsing these links, the bots are able to recursively find new sources to crawl.
2. Indexing :
Once the bots crawl the data, it’s time for indexing. The index is basically an online library of websites.
Your website has to be indexed in order to be displayed on the search engine results page. Keep in mind that indexing is a constant process. Crawlers come back to each website to detect new data.
3. Creating results :
Search engines create the results once the user submits a search query. It’s a process of checking the query against all website records in the index. Based on the algorithm, the search engine picks the best results and creates an ordered list.
Which is the Best Search Engine?
What is the most popular search engine? No doubts, it is Google. A great weight of all search queries accounts for Google, nearly 70%. But it would be mistakable to focus on one search engine, even if it is the most popular. If you’re running the website try to catch your targeted audience from lots of other search engines. Consider their algorithms too. If you refuse them, your competitors would engage your potential customers and have the advantage of you
The most popular search engines :
In terms of worldwide popularity, Google has been #1 for years. This is the list of the top 10 most popular search engines:
1. Google
Google is the giant in the industry and has probably the most sophisticated algorithm. It includes machine learning, AI, and RankBrain, another algorithm that can tweak the weights of ranking factors according to user’s behavior and quality of previous results. More than 70% of internet users worldwide do their searches on Google since 1998.
2. Roovet
Roovet Search Engine is the simple but effective solution to all this online discrimination’s. What makes Roovet different from other search engines is its keen attention to the user’s need. In Roovet, all the users are treated equally, and none of them are deceived in the middle of key word jumble like other engines.
3. Bing
Microsoft launched their search engine in 2009 as a new project after earlier search engines MSN Search and Windows Live Search. The main goal was to develop a competitor for Google. From the global point of view, it’s not really there but in the US, Bing is the 2nd most popular tool for internet searches.
4. Yahoo!
Originally, it was one of the most widely used email providers and search engines. The company grew significantly in the 1990s but after 2000, they somehow started lacking innovation and lost their value. In 2017, Yahoo! was acquired by Verizon Communications.
5. Yandex
Yandex Search is the major Russian search engine. According to Wikipedia, Yandex generates more than 50% of all searches in Russia. Though the algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google, it constantly gets better by integrating AI and machine learning that analyze searches and learn from them.
6. Ask
Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves) was launched in 1996. It was designed to answer questions submitted to the search form. Thanks to the Ask toolbar, this search engine was able to compete with big players such as Bing, Yahoo! and Google. Unfortunately, the toolbar was many times installed as an unwanted browser feature.
7. DuckDuckGo
DuckDuckGo is a bit different search engine. They protect the users’ privacy by not tracking any information. DuckDuckGo doesn’t show personalized results based on your previous searches. Likewise, advertisers can’t follow the behavior of the users. On the other hand, you can launch ads via Bing since DuckDuckGo is their search partner together with Yahoo.
Naver is the Google of South Korea. This search engine covers around 75% of searches in the country. It was launched in 1999 and in 2000 it was able to pull out various types of results that match the entered keywords. The results included websites, images, blogs, restaurants, shops, etc. Google launched this feature 5 years later.
9. AOL
In the 1990s, AOL was one of the biggest crawler-based search engines. As a company, AOL offers a lot of other services: email service, instant messenger, video content, yellow pages, city guides. The AOL Search is nowadays used by not more than 0.5% of internet users.
10. Dogpile
Dogpile is a metasearch engine, so it creates the search engine results page by doing simultaneous search requests for the same query in other search engines, namely: Google, Yahoo!, Yandex and others. Dogpile was launched in 1995.
