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Search engine

Updated: 02/27/2019 by Computer Hope

Illustration: Using a Search engine.A search engine is software, typically accessed on the Internet, that
searches a database of information according to the user's query. The engine provides a list of results
that best match what the user is looking for. Today, there are many different search engines available
on the Internet, each with their own abilities and features. The first search engine ever developed is
considered Archie, which was used to search for FTP files and the first text-based search engine is
considered Veronica. Today, the most popular and well-known search engine is Google. Other popular
search engines include AOL, Ask.com, Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo.

How to access a search engine.

How a search engine works.

Do all search engines give the same results?

What is the best search engine?

Related pages.

How to access a search engine

For users, a search engine is accessed through a browser on their computer, smartphone, tablet, or
another device. Today, most new browsers use an omnibox, which is a text box at the top of the
browser that shows the address and is where you can also search on the Internet. You can also visit one
of the major search engines home page to perform a search.

How to find information on the Internet.

How a search engine works

Because large search engines contain millions and sometimes billions of pages, many search engines not
only just search the pages but also display the results depending on their importance. This importance is
commonly determined by using various algorithms.
Visual search engine exampleAs illustrated in the image on the right, the source of all search engine data
is a spider or crawler, which automatically visits pages and indexes their contents.

Once a page has been crawled, the data contained in the page is processed and indexed. Often, this can
involve the steps below.

Strip out stop words.

Record the remaining words in the page and the frequency they occur.

Record links to other pages.

Record information about any images, audio, and embedded media on the page.

The data collected above is used to rank the page and is the primary method a search engine uses to
determine if a page should be shown and in what order.

Finally, once the data is processed, it is broken up into one or more files, moved to different computers,
or loaded into memory where it can be accessed when a search is performed.

Do all search engines give the same results?

Not necessarily. Search engines use proprietary algorithms to index and correlate data, so every search
engine has its own approach to finding what you're looking for. Its results may be based on where you're
located, what else you've searched for, and what results were preferred by other users searching for the
same thing, for example. Each search engines will weigh these factors in a unique way, and offer you
different results.

What is the best search engine?

There isn't one search engine that is better than all the others. Some people could argue that Google's
search engine is the best and it is probably the most popular and well known. Often, if someone asks
how to do something, or what something is, another person will suggest they "Google it." "Google,"
used as a verb, means to search for results using the Google search engine.
Microsoft's Bing search engine is also popular and used by many people. Bing does an excellent job of
finding information and answering questions. Yahoo's search engine, while not quite as popular as it
used to be, still does an excellent job of searching for information.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/12708/search-engine-world-wide-web

Techopedia explains Search Engine

To simplify, think of a search engine as two components. First a spider/web crawler trolls the web for
content that is added to the search engine's index. Then, when a user queries a search engine, relevant
results are returned based on the search engine's algorithm. Early search engines were based largely on
page content, but as websites learned to game the system, algorithms have become much more
complex and search results returned can be based on literally hundreds of variables.

There used to be a significant number of search engines with significant market share. Currently, Google
and Microsoft's Bing control the vast majority of the market. (While Yahoo generates many queries,
their back-end search technology is outsourced to Microsoft.)

This definition was written in the context of World Wide Web