What is a Search Engine?
A Search Engine is a software that searches and identifies particular information in the database which is related to the keywords specified by the user. The information is searched in the www(World Wide Web).
How does Search Engine Work?
In general, it follows these 5 steps
- Crawl
- Index
- Sort
- Algorithm check
- Display
Crawling
The search engines have a bot which crawls or visits all the data present in their servers.
Google has named its bot as a spider.
Indexing
While crawling the bot collects all the data which is related to the keyword specified by the user.
Sorting
All the data that is collected in the process of indexing is sorted based on the most recent information.
Algorithm check or Ranking
All the sorted data is given a rank based on the pre-determined algorithms. These algorithms are often updated by the search engines.
Display
After ranking the websites the data is presented or displayed to the user.
What are the types of Search Engines?
Primary Search Engine
Primary Search Engines are the ones which are widely used. Google, Bing, Baidu, MSN are a few of the primary search engines.
Secondary Search Engine
These are comparatively less used as they serve different issues. Top secondary search engines are Quora, Askme, Lycos, Looksmart.
Human Powered Search Engine
Human Powered Search engines and more or less handled by a large group of people. Nowadays even this is being automated. Justdial, Yahoo Directory and Buzzour are the top human-powered search engines.
List of Search Engines
- Veronica & Jughead (1992)
- Vlib (1992)
- Excite (1993)
- Yahoo (1994)
- Web Crawler (1994)
- Lycos (1994)
- Info Seek (1995)
- Alta Vista (1995)
- Archive (1996)
- Inktomi (1996)
- Ask Jeeves (1997)
- Google (1998)
- MSN Search (1998)
- Bing (2009)
What is a website?
Website is a collection of related web pages, which can be accessed by visiting the homepage using a browser.
The first website was built by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN and was online on August 6, 1991.
You can browse the first website here: http://info.cern.ch/
What are webpages?
Every page on a website is called a webpage.
In short, a website is a central hub that contains one webpage or a series of webpages.
Search Engine always ranks the webpages and not the websites in their SERP(Search Engine Result Page).