6:42 PM
Balaji Naidu
How did search engines begin, and where are they going? we use them so often that we take them for granted and forget how miraculous it is to be able to find answers to our most ridiculous questions within just a few seconds. It was the web directory which was used to find the information before the development of Search engines. The first ever directory was created by David Filo and Jerry Yang in April 1994, which was known as Yahoo! directory. As the number of links get increasing in such directory and thus their arose a need of Searching from vast data and it was than the first WebCrawler was developed the very same month. This web crawler was capable of indexing the entire pages and these lead a development of new form of search. The Search engine was born.Following the development of WebCrawler Lycos, Ask Jeeves, and ultimately Google, was launched in 1998. Thus the Era of content search was developed. Search engines are an extremely powerful way of promoting your website online. Many studies have shown that between 40% and 80% of users found what they were looking for by using the search engine feature of the Internet.
According to Search Engine Watch 625 million searches are performed every day! The great thing about search engines is they bring targeted traffic to your website. These people are already motivated to make a purchase from you- because they searched you out.
Let See different Types of Search Engine:
Crawler-Based Search Engines
Crawler-based search engines use automated software programs to survey and categorize web pages. The programs used by the search engines to access your web pages are called ‘spiders’, ‘crawlers’, ‘robots’ or ‘bots’.
A spider will find a web page, download it and analyse the information presented on the web page. This is a seamless process. The web page will then be added to the search engine’s database. Then when a user performs a search, the search engine will check its database of web pages for the key words the user searched on to present a list of link results.
The results (list of suggested links to go to), are listed on pages by order of which is ‘closest’ (as defined by the ‘bots’), to what the user wants to find online.
Crawler-based search engines are constantly searching the Internet for new web pages and updating their database of information with these new or altered pages.
Examples of crawler-based search engines are:
1) Google (www.google.com)
2) Ask Jeeves (www.ask.com)
Directories
A ‘directory’ uses human editors who decide what category the site belongs to; they place websites within specific categories in the ‘directories’ database. The human editors comprehensively check the website and rank it, based on the information they find, using a pre-defined set of rules.
Examples of Web directories are:
1) Yahoo Directory (www.yahoo.com)
2) Open Directory (www.dmoz.org)
(Note: Since late 2002 Yahoo has provided search results using crawler-based technology as well as its own directory.)
Hybrid Search Engines:
Hybrid search engines use a combination of both crawler-based results and directory results. More and more search engines these days are moving to a hybrid-based model. Examples of hybrid search engines are:
Examples of Hybrid Search Engines are:
1) Yahoo (www.yahoo.com)
2) Google (www.google.com)
Meta Search Engines
Meta search engines take the results from all the other search engines results, and combine them into one large listing. Examples of Meta search engines include:
Examples of Hybrid Search Engines are:
1) Metacrawler (www.metacrawler.com)
2) Dogpile (www.dogpile.com)
Apart from these major types of search engine Special Search engines were developed to cater for the development of niche areas such as Shopping, local search, freeware & shareware Software etc.
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