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» What is Search Engine? » What is Keyword » How Search Engine’s Work » Understanding Search Engines » How Search Engines Rank Websites » Revenue Model of Search Engines » Major Search Engines » Differences in Google/Yahoo/MSN » Search Engine Listings » How Search Engine Users are Cheated » Search Engines’ Branding Strategy

Search Engine is defined as a program that searches documents for particular keywords and gives back a list of the documents where the related term or content is found. The term is specifically used to explain systems like Alta Vista and Excite that facilitate users to search for documents on the World Wide Web and USENET newsgroups.
 
Search engine works by co-coordinating a set of programmes that includes a spider also known as crawler that collects as many documents as possible. The second programme termed as indexer reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. And lastly a programme that receives your search request, compares it to the entries in the index, and returns results to you.

The collection of an index Wandex, by the World Wide Web Wanderer (a web crawler developed by Matthew Gray in 1993) first introduced the idea of presenting Search engine as an interface between users and the WWW. Next to follow was the introduction of the first "full text" crawler-based search engine, WebCrawler in 1994. Being the first search engine to be widely popular, they were also the first to set standards that let  users search for any word in any web page, that are followed by all the major search engines till the present day. The year 1994 also witnessed the emergence of Lycos to be later transformed into a major commercial endeavor.

This trend led to the creation of many search engines like Excite, Infoseek, Inktomi, Northern Light, and AltaVista to name a few, which appeared and gained popularity. They competed with popular directories such as Yahoo! in some ways, but later, the directories integrated or added on search engine technology for greater functionality.

The late 90’s also recorded the foray of several companies into the market recording spectacular gains during their initial public offerings thus making Search Engines the brightest stars in the Internet investing frenzy. It also saw companies like Northern Light take down their public search engine for marketing Enterprise editions.

The search engine Google, rose to prominence around 2001. While its success is based in part on the concept of link popularity and PageRank on the ground that essential pages are linked to more than others are, many other web sites and web pages link to a given page is taken into consideration with PageRank. The PageRank of linking pages and the number of links on these pages contribute to the PageRank of the linked page. Google in this way has made possible to order its results by how many web sites link to each found page thus resulting in Google's minimalist user interface to be very popular with users, although it has since then spawned a number of imitators.

Yahoo! initially used Google to provide its users with search results on its main web site Yahoo.com despite owning its own search engine. In the meantime, Yahoo! acquired Inktomi In 2002 and Overture (which owned AlltheWeb and AltaVista) in 2003. Later, when Yahoo! launched its own search engine in 2004, based on the combined technologies of its acquisitions; it had the potential of providing a service that gave pre-eminence to the Web search engine over the directory.

MSN Search, owned by Microsoft is the most recent and major search engine launched. While it previously relied on others for its search engine listings, it started off by introducing a beta version of its own results, powered by its own web crawler called msnbot in the year 2004 which started showing its own search results live in early 2005. This came as a huge development for many webmasters, who seek inclusion in the major search engines, even if it went unnoticed to average users who were unaware of where results are coming from.