The existence of a search engine and its development made it very easy as well as convenient to browse the internet. Generally, people prefer search keywords over the URL of any website nowadays.
There was a time when we got any kind of information from each other through verbal communication. We had a variety of books, magazines, and newspapers to gain knowledge as well as to stay updated.
As the number of websites was increasing it was difficult to remember all the names and find the particular webpage we visited before. Search engines helps a lot in such situations.
- What is Search Engine
- Origin of Search Engine
- Popular Search Engines
- Google – The Best Search Engine
- Working of Google Search
- Search Engine Optimization
1. What is Search Engine?
A search engine is a tool that brings us the matching results of our searches on the internet (i.e. text, images, videos, documents) from various websites in one place and we can find the answer to our questions in less time with minimum efforts.
Search engines put all the webpages related to our queries and display all of them in a sequence so we can go through and access any website to get the information we are seeking for.
2. Origin of Search Engine
1990- Archie was the first-ever search engine that was creation of Alan Emtage in 1990. The name ‘Archie’ was derived from ‘Archive’ because it could index downloadable files from the FTP archives.
1991- Tim Berners Lee created the World Wide Web in 1991 and firstly hosted the website on a computer of CERN. He also set up a WWW Virtual Library which is the oldest index or catalog of the web and now there are around 300 sub-libraries in it.
The name can be elaborated as “Very Easy Rodent Oriented Netwide Index of Computer Archives”.
1993- Jonathon Fletcher wrote Jumpstation search engine in 1992, which started indexing on 12th December 1993. Later, he announced it for the public use on Mosaic browser on 21st December 1993.
Jumpstation used to index the title and header of webpages with a linear search and it was nominated for the “Best of Web Award” in 1994.
1994- David Filo and Jerry Yang launched Yahoo! Directory in 1994. It was the collection of many webpages. People manually submitted them for indexing because it has no crawler at that time. Moreover, a search function was added in 1995 and it became Yahoo! Search.
1995- AltaVista was a search engine that was launched on December 15, 1995. It was the first search engine with a simple user interface and advance features able to crawl full text of the webpages.
1996- In this year, Larry Page and Sergey Brin created the first search engine which could return a list of backlinks and based on page ranking algorithm. It was a research project and firstly its name was Backrub.
Lastly on 4th September 1998, it was established as Google Inc. which is the most powerful search engine today.
1997- Garrett Gruener and David Warthen created Ask.com in 1996 which was named Ask Jeeves at that time.
It means “gentlemen’s personal gentlemen”. It was created so that users can post questions and answers in their native languages.
1998- MSN Search was provided by Microsoft in the third quarter of 1998 consisted of a search engine. Index and web crawler.
In 2006, Microsoft replaced it as Windows Live Search and further, the word Windows removed and it became Live Search in 2007. Finally, they officially rebranded it by bing in 2009.
3. Popular Search Engines
Ask.com was formerly known as Ask Jeeves. It has a question-answer based search format and Ask has its total market share in the search place is approximately 0.5%
Baidu is the most popular search engine of China. It was developed in 2000 and has more than a 75% share of China’s search queries. Although, people access Baidu worldwide, but chiefly it is available in Chinese language.
Bing can be considered the second most popular search engine in the world. It is a product of Microsoft which handles 33% of the US traffic.
Yahoo was the first popular search engine discovered in 1994. The internet was evolving in that duration.
Yahoo gains around a 3% market share of the searches happen worldwide.
Yandex is the search engine that captures 65% of the Russian traffic and also a popular choice in Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkey, and Ukraine.
DuckDuckGo search engine is the first choice of the people who don’t want their search data and activities to be tracked because it does not collect your browsing data or personal information and let you access the internet with privacy.
It does not have its own index or algorithm but it brings search results through various sources.
4. Google- The Best Search Engine
If you are reading this article it means you are an internet user and if you are familiar with the internet, then you must have heard the name of Google.
Among a large number of players Google is the world’s best and most popular search engine with more than 70% market share and handles above 85% of the mobile traffic.
It is an American Tech Giant Company. Larry Page and Sergey Brin (the students of Stanford University) established it in September 1998. Its headquarter is in Mountain View, California, U.S.
Google has undoubtedly the most advanced and most reliable group of algorithms to rank the webpages and find the search results of users.
The name of the main algorithm is PageRank which was named after the name of “Larry Page”.
Moreover, Google updates its algorithms in a regular interval to prevent the misuse of SEO techniques of website owners in order to rank their website on the first page.
5. Working of Google Search
Whenever we want to gather any kind of information on the internet, we simply ask our query and get a lot of favorable answers on Search Engine Result Page (SERP) within a fraction of seconds.
It looks very simple but there are a lot of processes that are running behind the search engine to provide us the most relevant content. Chiefly the procedure is as follows-
- Ranking Algorithm
Google has its own bot which is a Web Spider or Web Crawler. It is not a real spider but, a software system that visits every website on the internet.
It crawls over each webpage in order to read the whole source code (including headings, text, documents, images, media files, etc).
When it finds any backlink of another webpage or a websites then it jumps over there and keeps crawling the whole page in the same manner.
In this way it collects all the information about every website and stores all the data on its local server.
When the web crawler collects all the information about every website it keeps storing that data. But, this data has a totally mixed format and it is hard to retrieve any information from here.
If someone searches for a particular topic so it would be difficult for Google to find the relevant results from the messed up data.
Hence, the indexer analyzes all the websites through their meta description. Finally, it arranges them in categories after gathering all the aspects.
There are various categories such as banking, business, education, entertainment, news, sports, politics, etc. It further divides them into sub-categories.
Analogous to the index of a book (lessons, topics, and page numbers) the indexer prepares sequential data of all the source codes.
The source files of these webpages and arranges them in order. But the ranking algorithm decides the ranking of these websites.
Crawling and Indexing is just like the procurement of raw material and the preparation of initial ingredients to cook food in a restaurant.
Whereas ranking is the process of cooking the dish in real-time ordered by the customer.
Google has its own ranking algorithm which provides real-time convenience to the users in getting proper search results.
It is basically a set of rules that decides the appearance of web pages to display from most relevant to least relevant on the basis of different keywords.
What are Keywords?
Basically, the purpose of searching for anything on the internet is to get information about it. Whatever we want to search is our query of course, and the words or phrases that we use to define our query are our keywords.
How Google Ranks a Webpage?
The first criteria of ranking a webpage in the search result are the matching of keywords in a query. But there are lots of other factors that the algorithm considers to provide more relevant and more accurate search results. Some of the factors are-
- Matching of keywords or keyphrases
- Density of keywords or keyphrases in the text
- Presence of keywords in title, headings
- Average monthly visitors of a website
- Dwell time of the website
- Security level of the website (SSL certificate)
- Backlinks referring to that website
Google uses more than 200 factors at the same time in every search to decide the ranking of a website as first, second, third and so onwhich provide the results with high accuracy.
6. Search Engine Optimization
Every website owner wants Google web crawlers to crawl as well as index their website so that it can appear to the users in search results.
The process of polishing the website according to the algorithms of the search engine and the search behavior of the users in order to get more traffic is Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
Search Engine Optimization is basically a technique to analyze the current trend, the search volume, and pattern of users and to provide the content that satisfies their need.
There are so many strategies that marketers use in SEO but, the aim is similar that the website should rank on the first page of search results because the second page does not exist for the majority of people.
There are so many popular search engines but whenever we want to search anything on the internet, instead of saying “Search it” we say “Google it”.
This is just because Google has positioned itself as the first choice of everybody due to its powerful software and reliable services.
We can learn this from Google that providing the best services to your customers constantly and adapting the changes in technology quickly makes you their prior choice.
The process of gaining traffic to our website through organic methods according to the algorithm is Search Engine Optimization.
If we pay some amount to display our website on top in every matching keyword, then this method of gaining traffic is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
Algorithm is a formula or a set of instructions defined by the developer. A software performs its calculations and gives output in response to the actions of users based on its predefined algorithm.
Search engine analytics is the detailed information about the searches performed by users that helps to analyze and improve our service.
Analytics tells about trending topics, search volume of keywords, related searches, geographical & demographic data.
Keyword is a single word whereas keyphrase is a group of words that consists of two or more keywords.
User can search a single term or a group of terms. We have to think about all the possible aspects and optimize our content according to that.
For example – “smartphone” is a keyword, but “best smartphone under 15000” is a keyphrase.
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