Search Engine

• A search engine helps people to find out the information they are looking for online using keywords or phrases.
• Search engines can return results quickly in millions of seconds, by scanning the Internet continuously.
• When the user enters keywords or key phrases into a search engine then the user receives a list of Web content results in the form of websites, images, videos, or other online data that best match with the user trying to find.
• The content returned via a search engine to a user is also called a Search Engine Results Page (SERP).
• Nowadays, many different search engines are available on the Internet, each with its abilities and features.
• The first search engine was developed named Archie, to search for FTP files, and the first text-based search engine was Veronica.
• A Web crawler, database, ranking algorithms, and search interface are the major component of a search engine that makes a search engine work.
• Search engines also uses Boolean expressions like AND, OR, NOT to widen and restrict the results of a search.
• Today, the most used and well-known search engine is Google, other popular search engines are AOL, Ask.com, AltaVista, Baidu, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Excite, LYCOS, Yahoo, Yandex, etc.

Working of Search Engine

• Search engines use proprietary algorithms to index and correlate data, so every search engine has its approach to finding what you're trying to find.
• Results of the search engine may be based on where the user is located, what else the user was searched for, and what results were preferred by other users searching for the same thing.
• Each search engine uniquely weights these and offers different results.

There are three key steps to how most search engines work:

Crawling

• Crawling is the first stage where a search engine uses web crawlers to find, visit, and download the web pages on the World Wide Web.
• For this search engines use software programs, called spiders, bots or crawlers, to scour the internet, to review the website content. they may do this after every few days.

Indexing

• Indexing is an online library of websites, which is used to sort, store, and organize the content found during crawling.
• Once a page is indexed, it appears as a result of the most valuable and most relevant query.
• With the help of good SEO practice the search engine will understand web content so that it can rank the right results for appropriate search queries.

Ranking

• This is the last stage of the search engine working.
• It is used to provide a piece of content that will be the best answer based on the user's query.
• These search results are ranked based on many factors such as keyword density, speed, and links.
• The search engine's aim is to provide the user with the most relevant result.

Advantages of Search Engine

In today's era, the search engine is a very important part of everyone's life because it facilitates various ways to find valuable, relevant, and informative content on the Internet.

Some of the major advantages of the search engine are as follows:

• Advanced Search - This makes user searches more flexible as well as sophisticated.
• Free Access - Most search engines allow users to search their query for free of cost. There is no restriction related to the number of searches.
• Time-Saving - Do search operations at a very high speed.
• Relevance - The search engine allows relevant content-based search by using a particular keyword.
• Precision - Provide very precise results.

Disadvantages of Search Engine

With advantages, there are a few disadvantages of search engines are as follows:

• Sometimes the search engine takes too much time to display the result.
• Search engines, frequently update their algorithm, hence it is very difficult to find the algorithm in which search engine works.
• It also makes users lazy and effortless because all the time they use search engines to solve their small queries and problems also.