Search Engines are the programs that searches for and identifies items in a database that correspond to keywords or characters specified by the user, used especially for finding particular sites on the World Wide Web.
These are work by users who search using words, and some common words are saved which are known as Keywords.
Search Engine refers to a huge database of internet resources such as web pages, newsgroups, programs, images etc. It helps to locate information on World Wide Web.
User can search for any information by passing query in form of keywords or phrase. It then searches for relevant information in its database and return to the user.
Search Engine Components
Generally there are three basic components of a search engine as listed below:
- Web Crawler
- Database
- Search Interfaces
Web crawler
It is also known as spider or bots. It is a software component that traverses the web to gather information.
Database
All the information on the web is stored in database. It consists of huge web resources.
Search Interfaces
This component is an interface between user and the database. It helps the user to search through the database.
Search Engine Working
Web crawler, database and the search interface are the major component of a search engine that actually makes search engine to work. Search engines make use of Boolean expression AND, OR, NOT to restrict and widen the results of a search. Following are the steps that are performed by the search engine:
The search engine looks for the keyword in the index for predefined database instead of going directly to the web to search for the keyword.
It then uses software to search for the information in the database. This software component is known as web crawler.
Once web crawler finds the pages, the search engine then shows the relevant web pages as a result. These retrieved web pages generally include title of page, size of text portion, first several sentences etc.
These search criteria may vary from one search engine to the other. The retrieved information is ranked according to various factors such as frequency of keywords, relevancy of information, links etc.
User can click on any of the search results to open it.
Architecture
The search engine architecture comprises of the three basic layers listed below:
- Content collection and refinement.
- Search core
- User and application interfaces
List of Top 10 Most Popular Search Engines In the World
No need for further introductions. The search engine giant holds the first place in search with a stunning difference of 66% from second in place Bing.
According to the latestnetmarketshare report (January 2018) 74.52% of searches were powered by Google and only 7.98% by Bing.
Google is also dominating the mobile/tablet search engine market share with 93%!
- Bing
Bing is Microsoft’s attempt to challenge Google in the area of search, but despite their efforts they still did not manage to convince users that their search engine can produce better results than Google.
- Yahoo
Since October 2011 Yahoo search is powered by Bing. Yahoo is still the most popular email provider and according to reports holds the fourth place in search.
- Ask.com
Formerly known as Ask Jeeves, Ask.com receives approximately 0.05% of the search share. ASK is based on a question/answer format where most questions are answered by other users or are in the form of polls.
It also has the general search functionality but the results returned lack quality compared to Google or even Bing and Yahoo.
- AOL.com
According to netmarketshare the old time famous AOL is still in the top 10 search engines with a market share that is close to 0.04%. The AOL network includes many popular web sites like engadget.com, techchrunch.com and the huffingtonpost.com.
- Baidu
Baidu was founded in 2000 and it is the most popular search engine in China. It’s market share is increasing steadily and according to Wikipedia, Baidu is serving billion of search queries per month. It is currently ranked at position 4, in the Alexa Rankings.
- Wolframalpha
Wolframalpha is different that all the other search engines. They market it as a Computational Knowledge Engine which can give you facts and data for a number of topics. It can do all sorts of calculations, for example if you enter “mortgage 2000” as input it will calculate your loan amount, interest paid etc. based on a number of assumptions.
- DuckDuckGo
Has a number of advantages over the other search engines. It has a clean interface, it does not track users, it is not fully loaded with ads and has a number of very nice features (only one page of results, you can search directly other web sites etc).
I am sure that some of the features of duckduckgo will be used by other search engines and with some proper funding duckduckgo can get a decent search engine market share.
Update: According to duckduckgo traffic stats, as of October 2018, duckduckgo is serving more than 30 million searches per day.
- Internet Archive
archive.org is the internet archive search engine. You can use it to find out how a web site looked since 1996. It is very useful tool if you want to trace the history of a domain and examine how it has changed over the years.
- Yandex.ru
According to Alexa, Yandex.ru is among the 30 most popular websites on the Internet with a ranking position of 4 in Russian.
Yandex present themselves as a technology company that builds intelligent products and services powered by machine learning. According to Wikipedia, Yandex operates the largest search engine in Russia with about 65% market share in that country.
As a final word, if you search “What is the best search engine?” in any of the search engines listed above, you will get an answer that Google is the best and most popular search engine and Bing is in the second place (on a Global level).
These are the 10 best and most popular search engines on the Internet today.
The list is by no means complete and for sure many more will be created in the future but as far as the first places are concerned, Google and Bing will hold the lead positions for years to come.
