What is a Search Engine?
A Search engine is a medium to search web pages on the world wide web using the web search query. For example, if we want to search the tutorial websites then we will use the keyword "tutorial" and search it on search engine. After that search engine will use the keyword and find out the related websites. Once the search is completed we will see the result in a list form that is also called search engine results pages (SERPs). The Search engine fetches the information such as videos, web pages, articles, videos, research papers from the database. The content which is not searched by the Search engine is referred to the as deep web.
Top Search Engine Based on Market Share
The following figure represents the search engine market share. We can see Google has the highest market share around 92.04% in the world as of February 2021 stats.
Components of Search Engine
The following are the basic components of a Search Engine.
1. Search Interfaces
It provides an interface between the user and the database of the search engine. Using Web interface users can search the required detail on the Web. Users can search for any kind of information over the web and search engines find that information in the database and show the list of details.
2. Web Crawler
The web crawlers are also called the web spiders or spider bots that are managed by Web Engine to perform web indexing. For example, if there is a website that is getting updated on daily basis in that case the search engine will have to have an updated indexes of records to provide a better user search experience, in that case, bots are used to crawl the web content and provide an updated detail to search engine for indexing. The bots use the target system resource for crawling. We can restrict the crawling by proving only those addresses of the website that are required in the roboot.txt file.
3. Database
The database component of the search engine stores all sets of web resources such as images, web pages, research papers, files, articles, and so on.
Working of a Search Engine
- The first step that a search application performs is collecting the required content on which a search operation can be performed.
- Once the required content is gathered post that building of document is done from a row content so that search application can translate and understand it.
- Once the building of the document is done post that the analysis of the document is started.
- Once the analysis is completed the index building process is started. It is an important step in which documents are organized in a way so that fast search can be performed.
- After all the above steps, the document can be searched now and for that, a user interface is required in which a user can put his query to get the relevant web content. Web browser plays that role for a user or a user-created search application.
- Once the search request is made from the user the application creates a search object from the user text and search in the indexes to find the perfect match.
- After finding the correct match, the application sends the output to the user in the form of web links.
The following diagram depicts the workflow of a search engine.
Top 10 Search Engine in the world
The following is the list of the top 10 search engines in the world.
- Microsoft Bing
- Yahoo
- Baidu
- Yandex
- DuckDuckGo
- Ask.com
- Ecosia
- Aol.com
- Internet Archive