A Look at Web Search Engines

What is the meaning of web search engine:

Web search engine is a service provided by the software system that helps you with searching for information over the internet. SERPs i.e. Search Engine Results Pages shows the list of results regarding the information we search on the World Wide Web. The results include web pages, videos, images, articles, research pages, infographics as well as many different types of results. Web directories only contain data maintained by the human editors whereas search engines maintain a real-time data and also mine data from open directories. Web Search engine uses algorithms on web crawler to run efficiently.

In December 1990, the search engines made their debut over the web. The first search engine which was well documented searched the content files in the year 1990 and the files were FTP files. In September 1993, WWW was totally indexed by hand. A list was made which consisted of web servers that were edited and was hosted over the CERN. When a greater number of web servers went online it got difficult to maintain the list, thus the new servers listened on the NCSA site, with the title as “What’s New?”.

When the first content was searched over the internet, ‘Archie’ was the first tool used for it. Actually “Archie” is the name that actually meant ‘archive’ but without the letter ‘V’.

In 1991, Mark McCahill created gopher in a university that is situated in Minnesota. This led to 2 search programs that is Jughead and Veronica.
On 1993 June, Matthew Gray created the first web robot that is the Perl based World Wide Web wanderer, which was further used to create wandex that is the index. Till 1995 wanderer did performed properly by measuring the size of the World Wide Web.

Different types of search engines that you’re familiar with:

Well, most of us are familiar with Google search engine whose usage is rated to be 92.86 per cent worldwide recorded in February 2019. It is used in computers, laptops, smartphones etc. Well, other search engines include Yahoo and Bing and many more.

Google search engine:

At first (1998), Google started selling search items to goto.com which was a small search engine company.

Search engines service became a profitable business over the internet which initially was one of the most struggling businesses. This idea of selling search items made a significant effect on the search engine business. Around the year 2000 Google as a firm of search engine service made a significant impact. With an algorithm named PageRank, the company received better results with the searches. The latter founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin wrote on the paper about “anatomy of search engine”, where they mentioned that the iterative algorithm ranked the webpages using the numbers and Pagerank of the websites and the page links available there.

The main purpose of this search engine is to search for texts and data and information about the documents you want to know about. In 2011 Google added a new and astonishing feature that is ‘Google voice search’ where you can speak the topic and the Google search engine will get you information about it.

Yahoo search engine:

The headquarters of Yahoo is in Sunnyvale, California, which owns a popular search engine named “Yahoo search”. As per October 2018 Yahoo search engine was the 2nd most popular with its market share of 2.32 per cent.
Actually, Yahoo search provides an interface between the user and the internet which sent the queries to a searchable index and the supplement directory. The results were provided by Yahoo! Brand. Yahoo search engine was launched in 1994 by two students of Stanford University named as David Fillo and Jerry Yang.

Bing search engine:

Bing is a search engine which is owned as well as operated by Microsoft. It has its origins from Microsoft’s previous search engines i.e. Windows Live search and MSN search. Bing provides map search products, images, videos and web services. In 2009 Microsoft along with Yahoo! made a deal that Bing SE will be providing power to Yahoo! SE.
On 2011 October, Microsoft announced that they’re working upon a new kind of back-end search engine that would deliver results faster and will show more relevant search results.
On May 2012 another feature got added that was the ‘sidebar’ which is a social feature that searched for the user’s social networks.

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