A search engine is a software system which provides information from the internet according to the search query entered by the user. Be it finding the meaning of a tricky word, checking out a movie review, buying something, or getting the latest news, a search engine is a go-to destination. With loads of data spread over the web, a search engine helps us in sorting and filtering them to obtain desirable results.
The origin of search engines can be accredited to the necessity of locating published information. The first well documented search engine, “Archie” was developed in 1990 by a computer science student, Alan Emtage of McGill University, Canada. Archie was a tool for indexing FTP files. Many more search engines such as Veronica, Jughead, etc. were developed in the later years.
Yahoo!, devised in 1994 was the first well-received search engine on the web. Google came into prominence around the year 2000. Microsoft set up Bing in 2009. Presently, there are scores of active search engines available. For example: Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Duck Duck Go, Yandex, Baidu, etc.
As of now, Google is the most popular search engine in the world, holding more than 90% of the market share. No wonder the term “googling” is frequently used as a synonym for web search. There are only a few countries where Google does not rank among the top three most used search engines.
The quality of a good search engine lies in its potential to return relevant results to the user. The search engine analyses, organises and ranks vast amounts of information on the web to return a result page. It generally contains links to related websites, articles, images, infographics, videos, etc. Some search engines also provide customised result pages in accordance with the user’s past activity.
Every search engine consists of the following three parts: a crawler, a database or index, and a search interface or application. A crawler or spider browses through all the available web pages to collect information. This data is then stored in database or index and ranked using a unique algorithm. When we enter our query in the search interface, the engine provides matching results from the index.
Web searches can not only be carried out using text or phrases but also images. There are even search engines designed for finding particular content, data types, etc. Local search engines that operate in a specific geographic location are also available. Thus, search engines enable us to find anything we need on the web. In this expanding digital world, search engines do help in making our lives better.