Right from Yahoo, which set forth the viral precedence in the massive stage of search engines, to the currently ruling king of search engines, Google, they have been tightly integrated into everyday life.
Table of Contents
What is a Search Engine?
In layman’s terms, a search engine would be defined as a software system designed and created to carry out web searches.
Ranking higher in these search engine result pages is the undeniable goal of those pushing through the heavy internet traffic to gain revenue. And, to achieve that, it is highly recommended to get the help of an SEO Agency.
Now, Let us give you a better understanding of the search engines for you.
How do Search Engines work?
It is always better to know something better to conquer it. Let us give you a brief introduction as to how search engines work.
No matter how complicated technology has grown, search engines still follow the most basic steps to get things done.
Crawl: This is where search engines get crawlers, a program, to index and collect the data sorting it from the world wide web. The crawler goes in and out of every site through hyperlinks until it covers every site with hyperlinks.
Index: The data collected by the crawlers are analyzed, organized, and stored in the index so the engine can find the details quickly and present them in search results accordingly.
Rank: The final and important step helps search engines find out the relevance of each data it collected regarding the topic and ranks it accordingly from most relevant to the least.
How do Search Engines rank results?
Various sets of factors are taken into account when search engines rank the results. After all, there are millions of related data to every search word on the world wide web.
Things that are taken into consideration are given below but keep in mind taking these into consideration alone won’t help in ranking these are just stepping stones in the wide world of SEO.
Keywords
As the name suggests, keywords play an essential role when ranking results. If the keywords are properly placed, including the heading to various places on the site, and match the search query, there are higher chances of ranking.
Content
A well-written and well-optimized site content works in the long run and aid in the site’s ranking on the search results page.
Backlinks
When sites mention other sites in their content and link them to their site, it shows acceptance or trust in the site’s content. So, the more a site is mentioned on other sites, the more it helps in getting ranked.
User data
Ranking can be affected by a lot of factors. Search engines nowadays even use relevance of the search history and preferences of the user to rank the most favorable content.
Types of Search Engines
While we are familiar with the most common search engines, there are more types that function around the world.
Mainstream search engines: Search engine giants like Google, Yahoo, and Bing gives you access to every content available for free are called mainstream search engines.
Pro-Privacy search engines: With an increase in privacy concerns due to the data collected by mainstream search engines, users nowadays prefer private search engines. Ad-free engines like Neeva or ad-supported engines like DuckDuckGo are taking prominence.
Computational search engines: Search engines that specialize in answering only queries related to maths or science are called computational search engines one such engine is Wolfram Alpha.
Specialized search engines: Also known as vertical search engines, they narrow down the area of search to specialized categories. Search bars in e-shopping sites and social media sites like Nykaa, Amazon, and Pinterest.
Top 10 Search Engines
Here are the top 10 search engines that have evolved over time and are making waves in the market.
| Taking over 90% of internet traffic, Google has been ruling the charts for years now. | |
| Bing | According to a survey in 2020, Bing by Microsoft comes second to Google in search engines. |
| Yahoo | Even though it has given up the first two places, once ruling king, it still manages to stay in the top 3. |
| Baidu | China’s very own Google has taken over Google in a lot of ways in the country. |
| DuckDuckGo | One of the most trustworthy privacy-protected ad-supported search engines out there. |
| Yandex | It has taken over Google’s market in Russia, and it is the first search engine crossing Google that was monetized to sell ads. |
| Ask | A question-answer-based search engine that gives a preview of the site even before the link is clicked. |
| Naver | South Korea’s very own Google, which is also the first ever operator to bring in comprehensive search features. |
| AOL | New York’s finest web portal, but that was back in the 90s. It still stays in the top 10. |
| Seznam | Founded in 1996, it is both a web portal and a search engine. It is also the first web portal founded in Czech. |
Other Alternative Search Engines
Excluding the top 10 search engines, there are many more alternatives that users can use. Here are some of the alternatives.
Ecosia: While you surf the internet without sacrificing quality, Ecosia funds NGOs to plant trees.
Dogpile: It basically fetches the results from the top 3 search engines without the need to visit them separately.
Wolfram Alpha: is the nerdiest search engine that focuses on everything academic, from science to the stock market.
Qwant: Paris-based, most private EU-based search engine that neither tracks your searches nor sells your personal data.
Gigablast: Open source search engine with a quick return rate and also gives off a retro look.
These are some of the things you need to know when it comes to search engines. Even though there is more to search engines, these should be enough for every SEO master who is trying to get their sites in order.
To know more about SEO, you can stay tuned to Ahbiv; we also add in a Free SEO audit for your site. Contact us For More Information!
