What is Search Engine?

The majority do not know about search engines, and only use them. A search engine is a masterpiece in the digital era. You can get every possible answer and solution available in the public domain. It is a software program, and we search for our queries to get relevant results.

what is search engine

What is a Search Engine?

It is a type of service by which users can access websites via the World Wide Web (WWW). There are so many search engines available to use. Every search engine carries different kinds of abilities and features.

Few people know about the first search engine ever developed. And it is Archie, which is used to search FTP files. Veronica, known as the first-ever text-based search engine, was accessible to ordinary people. Today, one of the giant search engines is Google. It began in 1998 and is still providing excellent service today.

Google is one of the most used search engines. There are more than 4 billion people. Yes, you read it correctly and do not be surprised by it. Because Google was ready to adopt new things to make search results perfect day by day. Google works to improve its results to make them accurate and reliable.

There are many alternative search engines known as Bing, Yahoo, AOL, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, and so many.

So, before you know how search engine works. You should know about three basic points.

  • Web crawlers, also known as spiders or bots, collect website information across the internet.
  • A database is a place where search engines store their data.
  • Search Interfaces: act as a bridge between the user and the database. It is the reason behind search results.

How Do Search Engines Work?

A Web crawler, search interfaces, and databases are the basic components of the search engine. We cannot imagine a search engine without any one of them. Search engines have plenty of web pages for one query. Showing search engine result pages (SERPs) for one query is not an easy process. It is all decided by the search engine’s algorithm which web pages could be best for queries.

It is understandable. A search engine follows three basic phases to offer the best results to its consumers. We will check them one by one.

Crawling

Most people have no idea about crawling and indexing (we will talk about it later). Crawling is an initial process by which search engines discover new web pages and websites. First of all, web crawlers investigate those pages. Bots follow and scan backlinks, referring to them for the next step in the process.

Indexing

After the crawling process, the search engine validates web pages. And stores them in its database. This process is known as indexing to show web pages in SERPs. And if your sites will not index, then the webpage will not appear in search results.

Let it Understand by a Simple Example.

If you have an online local cake-making website. Google will not show your website under the “cake near me” keyword phrase until your website is indexed. So, it is a fundamental step, and you can skip it. Skipping it means you do not want an online business, to be honest.

How to Know If Your Website is Indexed or Not?

Please use the site: mywebsite.com trick to determine whether your website is indexed. If your site is index, push it up in the search engines. If it is not, then find out why it is happening.

Position in Search Results

In short, you can say, the ranking process. Once your domain name is indexed in the search engine. After performing better search engine optimization activities to improve website ranking. You can see your website’s web pages for some particular keywords in search engines.

You must read our SEO-related blogs to learn more about the ranking process. And how to implement the different types of SEO like on-page SEO and off-page SEO strategy to make a good website.

Types of Search Engine

There are four main types of search engines that you can use. All these types of search engines are made for different uses of search engines.

  1. Mainstream search engines
  2. Private search engines
  3. Human-powered directories
  4. Computational search engines
  5.  Meta search engines

Top 5 Search Engines

Let’s read about importance of search engine and some biggest search engines —

Google

Currently, they do not need any introduction because almost every person knows about it across the globe.

Bing

After Google, Bing is the most used search engine to find answers or solutions. Microsoft is the parent company of Bing, and it has been in service from 2009 till today.

Yahoo

There was a time when Yahoo was bigger than Google. But now, Yahoo is acquiring the 3rd position on this list.

Yandex

It is a Russian-based search engine. Yandex is famous in Turkey, Belarus, Ukraine, and eastern countries. Yandex accounts for 1% of total global traffic.

Baidu

Baidu, based in China, is one of the most popular search engines. If we talk about the world market, then hardly 1 percent of the world population uses it. And it is almost the same for Google.

List of Search Engines

S.NOList of Search Engines
1https://yandex.com/
2https://you.com/
3https://yep.com/
4https://openverse.org/
5https://www.bing.com/
6https://www.yahoo.com/
7https://duckduckgo.com/
8https://www.startpage.com/
9https://swisscows.com/en
10https://gibiru.com/
search engine examples

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How can a user use a search engine?

Every mobile phone, laptop, tablet, or desktop has a browser. Open it, and you will see the starting page there. Enter the terms that you want to know and click on the search button beside or below them. You can see relevant results for your question or query. Click on one of them (which you consider the best and most reliable for you).

Are a web browser and a search engine the same thing?

In a nutshell, no. Although the browser and the search engine function together. But these are two distinct entities. Brower is an application that you can install on your laptop, mobile phone, or tablet. It provides friendly pages to search for questions and answers.

For example, Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge, Opera Mini, and many more.

Search engine is a tool that can be accessed via a web browser. And provides relevant answers from their database.

Some search engine examples are Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yandex, AOL, Yahoo, Baidu, and others.

What is the best search engine on the market?

It is a complicated question because every search engine has different abilities. They use this to produce the finest possible results for their users. But, on behalf of traffic, Google is one of the big search engines in the world. It has a user-friendly interface and is committed to providing the best results for its users all the time.

Microsoft’s Bing is also one of the emerging search engines. It has captured the market very fast. According to a report, more than 7 percent of global traffic is earned by Bing. And 85 percent of traffic goes to Google.

Yahoo ranks third in this race, accounting for nearly 3% of total traffic.

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