Section 3.0 Search Engines

“ A world where everyone creates content gets confusing pretty quickly without a good search engine” – Ethan Zuckerman

What is a search engine?

Search engines allow you to search the internet for content using keywords. Despite the fact that the market is dominated by a few, there are many search engines that people can use. When you enter an inquiry into a search engine, a search engine results page (SERP) is returned, ranking the found pages in order of their relevance. How this ranking is done differs across search engines.

Search engines often change their algorithms (the programs that rank the results) to improve user experience. They aim to understand how users search and give them the best answer to their queries. This means giving priority to the highest quality and most relevant pages.

How do search engines work?

Every search engine uses different complex mathematical formulas to generate search results. The results for a specific query are then displayed on the SERP. Search engine algorithms take the key elements of a web page, including the page title, content and keyword density, and come up with a ranking for where to place the results on the pages. Each search engine’s algorithm is unique, so a top ranking on Yahoo! does not guarantee a prominent ranking on Google, and vice versa. The algorithms used by search engines are not only closely guarded secrets, but they are also constantly undergoing modification and revision. This means that the criteria to optimise a site best must be deduced through observation, as well as trial and error — and not just once, but continuously.

There are three key steps to how most search engines work:

Crawling – search engines use programs called spiders, bots or crawlers to scour the internet. They may do this every few days, so it is possible for content to be out-of-date until they crawl your website again.
Ranking – search results are ranked based on a number of factors. These may include keyword density, speed and links. The search engine’s aim is to provide the user with the most relevant result.
Indexing – the search engine will try to categorise the content on a web page through ‘keywords’. Following SEO best practices will help the search engine understand your content so you can rank for the right search queries.

Different search engines

Search engines have now become a part of our daily lives, whether it be carrying out research for Xmas presents or where the nearest steak house is in town. People are now becoming more and more dependent on search engines to get the answer to their everyday queries.

1. Google

Google Search Engine is the best search engine in the world, and it is also one of the most popular products from Google. More than half of the Search Engine market has been acquired by Google. The tech guru is always evolving and looking to improve the search engine algorithm to provide the best results to the end user.

2. Bing

Bing is Microsoft’s answer to Google, and it was launched in 2009. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft’s web browser. At Bing, they are always striving to make it a better search engine, but it’s got a long way to go to give Google competition. Microsoft’s search engine provides different services including image, web and video search along with maps. Bing introduced Places (Google’s equivalent is Google My Business), which is a great platform for businesses to submit their details to optimise their search results.

3. Yahoo

Although a leader as a free email provider, this is declining significantly with their recent acknowledgement that User Details & Passwords are being hacked.

4. Baidu

Baidu is the most used search engine in China and was founded in Jan 2000. This web search is made to deliver results for websites, audio files and images. It provides other services including maps, news, cloud storage and much more.

5. Ask.com

Founded in 1995, Ask.com, previously known as Ask Jeeves. Their key concept was to have search results based on a simple question-and-answer web format. It is a question & answer community where you can get the answers to your question, and it integrates a large amount of archive data to answer your question. Because of this dependency on archived and active user contributions, the results will not be as current as those you get in Google, Bing and Yahoo. They’ve tried to counter where their resources don’t have the answer they take help from a third-party search engine.

6. Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha is a computational knowledge search engine which does not give a list of documents or web pages as search results. Results are based on facts & data about that query. Their mission statement is to make all systematic knowledge computable and broadly accessible. Launched in 2009, they now have a Pro solution designed with pricing for Students and Educators. Much as it’s targeted, it’s an awesome tool for the right market.

7. DuckDuckGo

A general search engine designed to protect user privacy does not track user IP addresses and other information. Its anti-tracking policy means you’ll have more control over your data with them. However, the downside of it is your traffic is not encrypted, making it vulnerable to eavesdropping and IP address discovery, your internet service provider (ISP) will still be able to see what you’re doing online and may share that information with third parties whilst DuckDuck Go themselves policy would not.

8. Yandex

Launched in 1997, Yandex is the most used search engine in Russia. Yandex also has a great presence in Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus and Turkey. It provides services like Yandex Maps, Yandex Music, online translator, Yandex Money and many others services.

Now you’ve learnt a bit more about the best and most popular web search engines in the world, it is time for you to capitalise on these online opportunities. Among them Google, Bing and Yahoo are dominating the search engine market (on an aggregated search traffic basis) and are used daily by most people in the world.

There is a lot of information on the Internet, and search engines make this information easier to find. You need to get up to speed with using search engines to cut down on the amount of information you go through to find what you actually need. This is the time to use search engines to the best of our ability. Learn to improve your search on the internet using keywords.

In our world today, we turn to the internet and search engines for anything we need, but the accuracy of these search engines can not be totally relied upon. Search results can be misleading therefore, you would need to read more than just the first link provided on the page to make conclusions about what you need to know.

Search Control

Since 2020, it has come to light that search engines together with social media are censoring certain information. In order to do this, they have to program what they are told or seem to be fit for the searches to be delivered. This is of great concern as manipulating search data makes the search unreliable and not trustworthy despite any given reason. No one will ever know if what they are searching for is actually the proper answer or not. As the consumer of data using search engines, it is merely impossible to know the authenticity of what is being engineered and fed as the results.

This is a breach of freedom of information at large. If the search engine has a puppet master pulling the strings, the questions need to be asked,

Are people aware of this?
Why should one still use it?
Can they be trusted at all?

They are exploring ways to use peoples’ data and with face recognition and in-home devices keeping track of everyone’s location and movements, controlling lives.

So part of how search engines now work includes manipulation and creation of the acronym C.R.I.M.E,

crawlers
rankings
indexing
manipulation
exploration

Summary

There are many search engines, the most used in the west is Google and in the East is Baidu.
Search engines use algorithms to perform complex mathematics formulas to provide solutions.
Search engine priority is to make searches quick and easy by priority of most searched keywords.
Search results can be manipulated.

“The ultimate search engine …would understand exactly what you mean and give back exactly what you want’’ – Larry Page

3.00 Keyword Research Ninja User Guide

Activity 3.0