On 6th August 1991, the first website was launched on internet. Just within 30 years there are almost 1.88 Billion website as of 2021. People need to search data from these billions of websites, which gave birth to search engines.
Why do we need search Engines?
Search engines help us find relevant results as per our queries. These search queries might be like “Hospital near me” or “Buy Special presents” or “When America got independence”. The job of search engines is to find and present data in human readable formats. Weather you need the answer to a complex mathematical query or a general search term, search engine is your back.
How Search Engines Work?
The Search engines scan websites, store web pages in their database and rank them according to their keyword relevancy.
Search Engines’ Spider
Search Engines have a specific software called “Spider” or “bot”. The job of these spiders is to scan websites, store these websites and rank them accordingly.
Crawl
The process of scanning a website by spider or bot is called “crawling”. Search Engine spiders start the process of scanning or crawling major websites (facebook, linkedin, twitter, etc.). When spiders find links of other web pages on major websites, they start crawling other websites as well.
Spider crawling carry on from one website to another and the chain carry on. Spiders re-crawl web pages according to different metrics. Crawling frequency depends on the web page type, for example news websites have better crawling frequency compare to small business website.
Index
Once the spider have crawled a web page, spider store it in search engines’ database and the process is called “Index”. After scanning (Crawling) and storing (indexing) a webpage, search engines assign a crawl budget for that specific page. Crawl budget defines when the page needs to be re-crawled.
Rank
After the pages are stored in search engine’s database, they get scores for their ranking in search results. This ranking is based on complex algorithm which counts website quality, authority and relevance to specific keywords.
Top 10 Search Engines in the World
Here is a list of major search engines where Google have 91.94% share of search market.
Google have got the lion’s share of the search engine market. It is one of the most famous search engine with almost 92% share. Founded in 1998, Google have gone through major algorithm updates and keep on updating to provide best results for end users. Google have 270 products including most useful products like Google Maps, Google Analytics, Google Console, etc. As per 2019, Google caters almost 3.5 billion searches daily.
Bing
Microsoft launched their search engine in 2009, named Microsoft Bing (commonly known as Bing). Bing have launched several products to enhance their search. These products includes but not limited to web search, video, image and map products. Bing have also launched Bing Places which is similar to Google My Business. Bing places is a great place for businesses to optimize for search results.
Yahoo
Yahoo search launched in 1995. In 2009, Yahoo uses Microsoft’s Bing to display web results. Yahoo still carries 1.5% share of the internet market search.
Baidu
Unlike the previous search engines, Baidu is a China based company, launched in 2000. Today Baidu is the largest search engine in China. Baidu is designed by one of the largest artificial intelligence company in the world. Alexa internet rankings show Baidu as the 6th largest website in the world. Baidu stands with 1.37% share of internet market.
Yandex
In 2000, Russia launched Yandex in Russian language. It has a 1.1% share of internet market search. Yandex have launched 70 products and services relevant to internet. These products includes online advertisement, e-commerce, transportation, navigation, search and information services and mobile applications.
DuckDuckGo
Launched in 2008, DuckDuckGo got a 0.67% internet market share. DuckDuckGo got its popularity by users for protecting their privacy. DuckDuckGo is in association with other search engines including Bing, Yahoo and Yummly.
AOL
AOL is among the pioneer internet companies which was launched in 1985. Until mid-1990s, AOL had millions of American users. Their products included email, web portal, web browser (Netscape) and instant messaging.
Ask
Formally knows as AskJeeves, Ask founded in 1996. Ask is a unique search engine which is based on a question answering based algorithm.
Excite
Excite launched in 1994 and was a popular website during 90s. Once Excite was sixth most visited website in 1997. Excite also had an email service named Excite Mail until 2021. It is not widely used but still stand among the top 10 search engines in the world.
Lycos
Lycos carry good reputation among major search engines until today, although it was established in 1994. The company have a wide network of email services, web hosting, entertainment websites and social networking channels.
Conclusion
Now you know that how does search engines work and the most popular search engines worldwide. Google carry weight with almost 92% of market share. This is why it is most popular with SEO experts. In case your target market is China or Russia, you have to work on Baidu and Yandex.
Let me know about your favorite search engine or any of their best products.