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Search Engines | View information about Search Engines within our Technology Website Reviews section by reviewing this area of our website. We provide a wealth of information online to help our visitors become better informed about Computer Buzz. |
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Search Engines
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The World Wide Web is easily the largest collection of data in the Solar System. However, it's nothing but useless trivia unless you have some way to search through it and sift it to find the URL that has what you're looking for. That will be a piece of software on a web site that is known as a search engine.
A search engine is an information retrieval system designed to help find information stored on a computer system, such as on the Web. The resulting list of places for you to consult is often sorted with respect to some measure of relevance of the results. Search engines use regularly updated indexes to operate quickly and efficiently. Some search engines also mine data available in newsgroups, databases, or open directories.
The first Web search engine was Wandex, a now-defunct index collected by the World Wide Web Wanderer, a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray at MIT in 1993. One of the first "full text" crawler-based search engines was WebCrawler, which came out in 1994. Unlike its predecessors, it let users search for any word in any webpage, and it became the standard for all major search engines since.
Soon after that, a number of search engines appeared, including Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista. They competed with popular directories such as Yahoo. Before long, the directories integrated or added search engine technology for competitive functionality.
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Google | The 900-pound Google-rilla
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No doubt about it, Google, with 56 percent of the search action, is currently the 900-pound gorilla of search engines on this planet. Google's minimalist user interface is very popular with users and has spawned a number of imitators.
It was along about 2001 when Google rose to prominence, its success based largely upon the concept of link popularity and an algorithm named PageRank. The number of other web sites and web pages that link to a given page is taken into consideration with PageRank, based upon the premise that desirable pages are linked to more other pages than less desirable ones. The PageRank of linking pages and the number of links on these pages contribute to the PageRank of the linked page. This makes it possible for Google to order its results according to how many websites link to each found page.
Annual revenues were most recently reported to be $10.6 billion.
Smaller search engines based on Google include: AOL Search, MySpace Search, Netscape, and CompuServe Search.
Official Website: Google.com
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Yahoo! search engine | website review
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The two founders of Yahoo!, David Filo and Jerry Yang, were graduate students at Stanford University when they started work on their historic search engine in February 1994 as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet.
In 2002, Yahoo acquired Inktomi, and in 2003 Yahoo acquired Overture, which owned the AlltheWeb and AltaVista search engines. Despite owning its own search engine, Yahoo initially kept using Google to provide its users with search results on its main website at Yahoo.com.
However, in 2004 Yahoo launched its own search engine based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions and provided a service that gave preeminence to the Web search engine over the directory.
Yahoo is now the number two most utilized search engine on Earth with an estimated 21 percent of the traffic and annual revenues of $1.67 billion.
Smaller search engines based on Yahoo's search engine include: AltaVista, AllTheWeb, and GoodSearch.
Official Website: Yahoo.com
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Microsoft Live Search | Good but not great
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The most recent major search engine is Live Search (formerly MSN Search), owned by Microsoft which previously relied on others for its search engine listings.
In 2004, MS debuted a beta version of its own results, powered by its own web crawler (called msnbot). In early 2005 , MS started showing its own results live and ceased using results from the Inktomi search engine (now owned by Yahoo). In 2006, Microsoft migrated to a new search platform, Live Search, and retired the "MSN Search" name.
Live search now has about eight percent of the search engine business.
Official Website: www.Live.com
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AOL search engine | Not the big dog any more
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Time was when America Online was far more than just a search engine, but those days are pretty well gone. AOL does not deliver the multi-faceted value that it once did, and the volume of spam that it transmits to its subscribers on a daily basis is nothing short of astronomical.
AOL has combined its search engine assets with those of Google so as to be perceived as delivering some sort of extra measure of performance that Computer Buzz is unable to detect. Somehow or another, this over-the-hill outfit has managed to hang onto a whopping five percent of the search engine traffic, but we're not buying it.
Official Website: search.AOL.com
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Ask.com | Formerly Ask Jeeves
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Ask.com was originally known as "Ask Jeeves," where Jeeves is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or English valet, fetching answers to any question that might be asked of hlim.
The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language. As time wore on and keyword search engines such as Google rose to prominence, indexing more web pages, Ask Jeeves suffered the loss of many of its users. The technology was reworked to allow keyword searches as well, but by this time Ask Jeeves had dropped below Google, MSN, and Yahoo in the size of its user base.
Today Ask.com has about two percent of the search engine traffic, and that puts it in fifth place overall. Annual revenues are reported to be $227,000,000.
Official Website: www.Ask.com
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