Search Engines and Its Types!!
What is a Search Engine?
The purpose of a search engine is to extract requested information from the huge database of resources available on the internet. Search engines become an important day to day tool for finding the required information without knowing where exactly it is stored.
Internet usage has been tremendously increased in recent days with the easy to use search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo! In this article, we will see different types of search engines and purpose of them.
Why Search Engines are Important?
Search engines are part of daily life for two types of people.
- Users who search and get information
- Site owners who try to optimize their websites for getting top rank in the search results.
User do more than billions of searches only on Google to find relevant information. This opens out a huge scope for businesses and online content publishers to attract people to their website for free.
Search engines follow guidelines and have their own algorithm to decide the ranking of websites in search results.Optimizing websites for Google and other search engines is an essential part of any website owner for reaching out the large audience.
The visitors can generate revenue for site owners either through advertisements displayed on the site or though purchasing products.
Different Types of Search Engines
Search engines are classified into the following three categories based on how it works.
- Crawler based search engines
- Human powered directories
- Hybrid search engines
- Other special search engines
Crawler Based Search Engines
All crawler based search engines use a crawler or bot or spider for crawling and indexing new content to the search database. There are four basic steps, every crawler based search engines follow before displaying any sites in the search results.
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Calculating Relevancy
- Retrieving the Result
Search engines crawl the whole web to fetch the web pages available. A piece of software called crawler or bot or spider, performs the crawling of the entire web. The crawling frequency depends on the search engine and it may take few days between crawls.
Example of crawler based search engines:
- Bing
- Yahoo!
- Baidu
- Yandex
Hybrid Search Engines
Hybrid Search Engines use both crawler based and manual indexing for listing the sites in search results. Most of the crawler based search engines like Google basically uses crawlers as a primary mechanism and human powered directories as secondary mechanism.
As human powered directories are disappearing, hybrid types are becoming more and more crawler based search engines.
In this though the crawlers control the processes, the control is manual to monitor and show the search results naturally.
Wrapping Up
During earlier days of Internet, human powered search engines were popular and important source of information. The technological world is moving very fast towards automation and artificial intelligence.
Big technology companies like Google and Microsoft, who own the popular search engines, are driving this change and getting benefit out of it.
None of the human powered search engines could survive this fast shift. Though people uses special purpose search engines in very small scale, at this point of time artificial or crawler based search engines acts as a primary source of information with minimal human intervention.
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