 What is a Search Engine?
A search engine is a program that searches documents stored on the World Wide Web for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. The term "Search Engine" is often used to specifically describe systems like Google and Yahoo that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web.
Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch (or crawl) as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document.  Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.
There there are 4 major search engines being used in today's search engine market place. The top 4 Search Engines are GOOGLE, YAHOO!, MSN and AOL Search. As you can see from the pictorial to the right - the top 4 Search Engines are where you want your web site to be seen - preferably in the Organic Placement Section and not just the PPC (Pay Per Click) Sections of the web site listings. These 4 Search Engines make up approximately 95-97% of all the web surfing public. |
