Learn more about major search engines

A short introduction about search engines

It is widely known that approximately 80 percent of the whole traffic on the internet comes from major search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. The importance of being highly ranked in the search engine listings or SERPs (search engine result pages) is of high priority for any business which wants a share of that traffic and to increase his revenue.

The main scope of a good search engine is to show the most relevant results in their listings for the keyword phrases typed in by searchers in the search box. By achieving good results searchers will keep coming back to those search engines relying on their high quality listings thus the search engines' traffic increases and bring them more advertising revenue from their paid listings.

History

There was a chaotic mess on the World Wide Web before first generation search engines appeared. There were already tons of information available but it was difficult to find what you actually needed. The history of search engines starts with the first student projects at the Universities which step by step got more sophisticated and advanced as well as effective in retrieving good results.

The first programme called Archie was written by Alan Emtage, a student at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. His software programme was able to identify and retrieve files on the internet. Other programmes have also appeared like Telnet, Gopher and Veronica. However the first real step of search engines' history came when the first 'robots' or 'spiders' (software programmes) appeared which could capture URL addresses on the web and it resulted in Wandex, the first web database. These robots also known as 'bots' were capable wandering the whole web looking for HTML pages and compile them in huge databases all this at a very high speed.

The first search engine project started at Stanford University and it was called Excite which dates back to 1993. Another important milestone in search engine history was when student Jerry Yang and his friend David Filo started a project as a hobby by indexing other interesting websites on their own and thus Yahoo was born. However there was a fundamental difference what they did and the other students. In Yang's and Filo's project robots did not play a role and it become the greatest human edited directory on the whole web.

Later another student started a new project and created a 'bot' which was capable reading the full of entire documents. His project made the appearance of Webcrawler which was later bought by Excite in 1997.

With the years passing by more search engines appeared with advanced searching capabilities like Alta Vista, Hotbot by Inktomi Corporation, Lycos and others.

To find out more about how the most renowned and biggest search engine appeared visit Google Milestones page where you can have a more in depth look into Google's history right from the beginning since 1995.

Why search engines became popular?

The answer to this question is very simple. At the beginning of the World Wide Web there were only a few websites but the increasing number of entrepreneurs who were considering beneficial making their presence online and have their own website, made it difficult for their customers to find their website without knowing the exact web address or URL. This is the point when a solution must have been found to overcome this detriment.

The solution came from the search engines which were getting more advanced with their algorithms filtering out the most relevant listings their customers (searchers) were interested in seeking for more information related to a topic or to find the product or service they needed. Search engines became the main door on the World Wide Web for most of the surfers all around the world.

How are search engines listing their results?

First of all we can distinguish two kinds of search results:

• Natural or Organic listings
• Paid or sponsored listings

In the natural or organic listings you can see the real results of those websites which are related to the search term you searched for and cover most of the SERPs. It is very important to be listed in this category since searchers rely mostly on these listings rather than the paid results which are basically paid ads.

By paid or sponsored listings we understand those listings which appear on the right side and in the top area usually with a blue background covering a much smaller portion of the whole page. This is the way search engines are generating revenue by adding paid results of websites which are paying to appear for terms related to their activity or topic.

Secondly we would like to let you know about the basics of how those listings are generated in the SERPs whenever someone is searching using keywords or phrases.

We also want to make sure that whenever you are searching in a search engine you are not searching the internet. Search engines are sending out 'spiders' or 'robots' which are crawling the net by following links and are indexing and storing the content of the websites in the search engine's huge database. Whenever you click on a natural listed webpage you are seeing the latest version of that particular website stored in the search engine's database.

The ranking in the listings is determined by the search engine's advanced and very complex algorithms which are sorting the websites by the level of relevancy and other factors.

Search engine statistics

The latest search engine statistics provided by comScore Networks', Hitwise and Nielsen Net Ratings show that in the US alone the number of searches has almost reached 7 billion in January 2007 which is a 19 percent increase over February 2006.

Share of searches by top 5 search providers: