What is a Search Engine and How Many Types are There?

Today the Internet is very easy to use, But this was not always the case.

When the Internet started, we had to go to different websites to find information on it, which took a lot of time and effort. But today it is not so!

Today we can extract information about any of them without going one by one in many websites, which saves both our hard work and precious time. Help us in this work- Search Engines. So what are these search engines and how do they work? Let us know in this article-

1) What is Search Engine?

In simple language, Search engine is a tool of the Internet with the help of which we can very easily extract or access our work information from many different websites.

Let us understand this with the help of an example-

Suppose we have reached that era of internet when search engines were not there but Internet was there! In those days, if a person needed information related to a topic (eg – What is Australia), then he had to go to websites related to that subject and manually find that information. This work was very tedious and time wasting.

But now it is not so!

Today, if we have to find information related to something, then we do not go to different pages of different websites to find them, but instead, we prefer to use search engines like Google and Bing.

Search engines show us the pages of many websites which are related to the questions we ask. This allows us to easily access the information that we need. This saves both our precious time and hard work.

All of you must have been using Google, but have you ever thought how it works?

2) How do Search Wngines Work?

Search engines are very complex software programs and their working method is also very complex. Modern search engines mainly work in 3 steps –

1. Crawling–

Crawling is the process from where it all starts. Means to visit or search the website’s data. Under this process, it starts taking data of the website.

In this, its main task is to scan the site and collect details about each page. For this, it goes to every page of the website and scans the title, images, keywords, and other linked pages etc. The work of different crawlers is also different from one another like someone looks at the page layout, one sees the advertisement in the pages, and some spam checks Linux.

But how to crawl a website? The automatic bot which is also called a spider who sees every page one after the other in the shortest time, uses the page link for this and finds out where to go next. In the initial days, Google Spider could read hundreds of pages every second, which has now been thousands of pages per second.

When a web crawler visits a web page, it collects every link in the page and adds it to its list which is to be visited as the next page. Then he visits the next page in his list and likewise, this series continues and continues. WebCrawlers also revisits the previous page whenever any changes are made to them.

This means that if any site is linked to an indexed site, then Google bots can quickly crack that site. Some sites are crawled very quickly while many sites are crawled to very deep but sometimes if the page hierarchy of a site is too complex then the crawler leaves them.

2. Indexing–

The indexing process occurs when the data is processed after Crawl and it is placed in the database. Let me explain this to you through a very simple example. When we study, we study whole syllabus. Every question and answer is read, but in the exam, write the same in the answer sheet, which is asked, in the same way during crawling the entire site is crawled but according to the query it indexes the post.

This is the reason that the search engine modifies the title and meta description written in the blog and sometimes shows it in the results page. There is no need to show bloggers who write titles and descriptions while writing blog posts. It shows the same as written for targeted keywords but one post ranks on many keywords and for other keywords the title and description can be something else. I have seen this many times in my post that when the post ranks on many more keywords besides the target keyword then the title for different keywords changes.

3. Retrieval & Ranking

Retrieval is when the search engine processes your entered query and shows the most similar content from your query. Most search engines differentiate themselves from other crawls by their retrieval process.

They maintain their own criteria for which page content fits for which query, according to which query they choose based on the page being searched. This is the reason that the results of queries to be searched in Google and Bing are different.

The Ranking algorithm finds billions of pages to show the most similar page to the query you are searching for. This algorithm created by companies is quite complex, hence the secret is kept on the secret of industry secret for its safety.

A good algorithm makes the user experience even better. They also do not want the web master to run their search algorithm on their own and go to the top incorrectly. If their method comes out, then the work of many hard working people will also be wasted who prepare the content with hard work and rank it on the basis of it.

3) Why are Search Engines Needed?

Search engines are a very important thing to easily access the Internet. Without the use of search engines, it is proven that for us to extract information about our work from the Internet.

New websites from search engines also become popular in less time. Search engines send traffic to crores of websites with which they earn money.

4) Types of Search Engines

Search engines can be divided into 5 categories based on their working-

1. Crawler Based Search Engines: Search engines that run only and only with the help of computer programs (also called spiders, crawlers, or bots); They do not require any person. They are called crawler based search engines.
2. Directory Based Search Engines: Search engines that display websites selected by a team of people only and in which no website is automatically shown. They are called directory based search engines.
3. Hybrid Search Engines: Those who use search engine crawlers/bots, as well as human selected things, are called hybrid search engines. Such as Google, Yahoo
4. Meta Search Engines: Search engines that do not keep millions of websites in their database. Rather, what people search for in them, they show them to people by searching them in big search engines like Google and Yahoo. Examples- DuckDuckGo, DogPile
5. Specialty Search Engines: Search engines that are made to cater to the demand of a particular kind or a particular area. Such as – Local Search Engine (JustDial), Shopping Search Engine (Yahoo Shopping).

5) History of Search Engines

The first search engine in the Internet world was Archie, born in 1990, a year after the establishment of the World Wide Web (www).

Archie did not answer the questions of people like today’s search engines, rather it used to download files from websites.

It was created by McGill University Canada’s three computer science students Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch in their college days.

After this, Gophers, a new form of Archi, came in the year 1991.

This was followed by a web crawler search in 1994, whichStill works today. Then came 1995, the world’s first popular search engine Yahoo!

After this, some other search engines like Magellan, Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista also came on the market but they could not last long.

Finally in 1997, the king of the Internet world came, which changed the definition of surfing the Internet.

6) What Would Happen if Google were not There?

If there was no Google on the Internet, we would have to roam on different websites to extract information, which would have wasted both time and effort.

After Google’s arrival, we now search our question on Google and Google automatically searches that question in millions of different websites and shows us the answer in less than seconds.

7) What is the Difference Between Search Engine (Google) and Internet?

Most of us feel that Google and Internet are the same things, but in reality, it is not.

While on one hand there is a repository of internet information, on the other hand search engine is a means of extracting your work information from that repository.

It is somewhat like sieving the flour. Here, we can consider the flour plate as Internet and the filter can be considered as Search Engines (Google). We can consider the filter to come as an answer to our question.

8) Some Popular Global Search Engines

1. Google

There is no doubt that Google is the most used search engine in the world. Google has approximately 63000 searches per second. Just think how many times a search is done per second, what will be the number of days and the whole year. If you look at this number, Google has about 2 trillion searches per year. Google was founded in 1997 by American computer scientists Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Google has about 92.81% of the search engine market share, the biggest reason that Google is popular is its information database, search for anything, you will get an answer right away.

2. 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.

3. Bing

Bing is made by Microsoft. It was launched 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.

4. DuckDuckGo

DuckDuckGo is a slightly different search engine. They protect the privacy of users by not tracking any information. DuckDuckGo does not show individual results based on your previous searches. For this reason, advertisers may not follow the behavior of users. On the other hand, you can launch ads through Bing because DuckDuckGo is their search partner with Yahoo.

5. Baidu – Chinese Search Engine

Baidu is the first search engine launched in China. This Chinese is like Google. Baidu collaborates with companies such as Microsoft, Qualcomm, Intel or Daimler on various AI projects. Similar to Google, they provide many other solutions such as cloud services, maps, social networking, image and video search and many more.

6. Yandex – Russian search engine

Yandex Search is the leading Russian search engine. According to Wikipedia, Yandex generates more than 50% of all searches in Russia. Although the algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s, it is constantly getting better by integrating AI and machine learning that analyzes searches and learns from them.

7. Ask (Ask.com)

Ask (earlier Jeeves) was launched in 1996. It was designed to answer the questions presented in the search form. Thanks to the Ask toolbar, this search engine was able to compete with big players like Bing, Yahoo and Google! But unfortunately, this toolbar is sometimes installed as an unwanted browser feature.

8. Naver

Naver is Google of South Korea. This search engine covers about 75% of searches in this country. It was launched in 1999 and in 2000 it was able to exclude a variety of results that match the keywords entered. Results included websites, pictures, blogs, restaurants, shops, etc. Google launched this feature after 5 years.

9. Dogpile

Dogpile is a metasearch engine, so it creates search engine results pages by requesting simultaneous search requests for similar queries to other search engines, such as: Google, Yahoo! Yandex and others. Dogpile was launched in 1995.

10. AOL

In the 1990s, AOL was one of the largest crawler-base search engines. As a company, AOL provides many other services: email service, instant messenger, video content, yellow pages, city guide. AOL search is currently not used by more than 0.5% of Internet users.