Search Engines
Search engines are the go-to sites when searching for products, services and ideas on the web. The results of the search engines are known as the search engine results pages or SERPs. Search engines are known to mine information on the web and deliver all these to the internet users based on the queries made.
How Search Engines Started
It all started with the project managed by Tim Berners-Lee. Also an important project that defined the now popular internet technology is Archie. This was a project of students from McGill University in Montreal where all files on the FTP sites were downloaded and in the process created a database. The limitation of the program is that the contents were not indexed. In 1991, two new search engines were created, Jughead and Veronica. These two names for the search engines was a playful follow-up to the earlier Archie. There were a number of catalogues that were maintained during the summer of 1993 but officially, none were considered search engines just yet. The first primitive search engine was written by Oscar Nierstrasz of the University of Geneva. From 1993, a number of developments happened and some basic search engines were introduced. This was the time when early search engines and sites like Yahoo,AltaVista and NorthernLight were introduced. It was in 1996 when the focus on search engines became intensified. Nestcape offered to host a search engine on the site. But due to the popularity of the offer, five search engines were hosted in rotation. This started the frenzy online and boosted the stock of search engines.
Top Search Engines
By 2000, Google entered the industry. The search engine became prominent due to its Page Rank innovation where websites and resources online were ranked.
How Search Engines Work
There are three important processes that are followed by all search engines online including the smaller ones like DogPile,AOL.com and Ask Jeeves. Search engines are known to crawl first the web, index what has been found and continue searching the web. Internet users will fist type in the query or the keyword and will hit ‘Enter’. Once done, the search engines will then check its indexed pages and find the most relevant searches. Websites like About.com, Go.com and iWon.com will be included in the searches.
Google is still the world’s biggest search engine. The search engine peaked in April 2010, in terms of market share. Other search engines that rival Google include Yahoo, Bing and Baidu.
There were come concerns regarding the process adopted by search engines. Though websites like Deja/Google, HotBotand DogPilewill rank based on popularity, still there are some perceived biases when it comes to rankings of the results. There are even reports of manipulating the results of the search engines called Google bombing and will target and involve different websites including Vivisimo,NBCiand Mamma.com. Though there are some concerns about manipulation, still by default search engines make use of popularity and MetaCrawler. Customized research will be made available as well and will cover different websites including News Search Portal.