On the Internet, on various sites, the user is offered a large amount of different information. To obtain the necessary information, search for answers to questions, search engines have been created. Hearing this phrase, many people think about Google, Yandex. However, there are many more search engines on the Internet.
What is a search engine?
The search engine is considered to be software that consists of a database of documents. Users are provided with a special interface that allows you to enter the necessary queries and receive links with relevant information. Documents that match the search for a specific person always go to the first positions in the search results.
Search results, which are generated in accordance with the entered query, usually contain different types of results. It may contain Internet pages, video and audio files, pictures, pdf-files, specific products (if the search is carried out on the online store).
Search Engine Classification
Existing search engines are classified into several types. First of all, it is worth mentioning traditional search engines. For such search engines, the principles of work are focused on finding information on a huge number of existing sites. Search engines are still on separate Internet resources:
- in online stores (to search for the right products);
- on forums and blogs (to search for posts);
- on information sites (to search for articles on the topic or news), etc.
Search engines are still subdivided according to geographical sign. In this classification, there are 3 groups of search engines:
- Global. Search is conducted all over the world. The leader in this group is the Google search engine. Previously, there were such search engines as Inktomi, AltaVista, etc.
- Regional The search is carried out by country or group of countries that are united by one language. Regional search engines are widespread. Their example in Russia is Yandex, Rambler.
- Local. The search is conducted in a specific city. An example of such a search engine is Tomsk.ru.
Search Engine Components
In any search engine, 3 components can be distinguished that determine the principles of the search engine:
- robot (indexer, spider, crawler);
- a database;
- request handler.
A robot is a special program whose purpose is to form a database. The database stores and sortes all the information collected. A request handler, also called a client, works with custom queries. He has access to the database. The client is not always located on the same computer. The query processor can be distributed across several physically unconnected electronic computers.
The principles of the search engines
All existing systems work on a single principle. Consider, for example, the functioning of traditional search engines designed for the Internet. The functioning of the robot is similar to the actions of an ordinary user. This program periodically crawls all sites, adds new pages and Internet resources to the database. This process is called indexing.
When a user on the Internet enters a specific query into the search line, the client starts working. The program accesses the existing database and generates the results by keywords. The search engine provides links to the user in a specific sequence. They are sorted as they match the request, i.e., relevance is taken into account.
Each search engine has its own way of determining relevance. If the user sends a specific request to different systems, then he will not receive exactly the same results. The relevance determination algorithm is kept secret.
More on relevance
In simple words, relevance is the correspondence of the word entered in the search or a combination of words to specific links in the search results. The position of documents in the list is affected by several nuances:
- The presence of words entered in the search in the documents. This nuance is obvious. If the document contains words from a user-entered query, then this means that this document meets the search conditions.
- The frequency of occurrence of words. The more often keywords are used in a document, the higher it will be in the list of results. However, not all so simple. Too frequent use of words can be a sign of poor-quality content for a search engine.
The relevance determination algorithm is rather complicated. A few years ago, links could appear in the search results that contain the necessary keywords, but which do not match their content. Currently, the principles of search engines are complicated. Now robots can fully analyze the entire text. The work of search engines is based on a huge number of different factors. Thanks to this, the SERP is formed from the highest quality, relevant links.
How to formulate queries correctly
Back in school, we were taught to ask questions correctly. It depends on what answers we will receive. However, this rule does not need to be observed when using search engines. For modern search engines, it does not matter what number or case a person writes his request. In any case, the issue will include the same results.
Search engines do not need a clear wording of the question. The user only needs to choose the right keywords. Consider an example. We need to find the text of the song “A Day Without You,” performed by the famous female pop group Via Gra. When contacting the search engine, it is not necessary to name the group, indicate that this is a song. It is enough to write “a day without you text”. Observe case, punctuation is not required. These nuances are not taken into account by search engines.
Search engine ranking in the world
The leading search engine in the world is Google. It was founded in 1998. The system is very popular, as evidenced by analytical information. About 70% of requests received on the Internet are processed by Google. The search engine base is huge. Indexed more than 60 trillion different documents. Google attracts users with a simple interface. On the main page are the logo and the search bar. This feature allows us to call Google one of the most minimalistic search engines.
In second place in the ranking of popular search engines is Bing. She appeared in the same year as Google. The creator of this search engine is a well-known international corporation Microsoft. Lower positions in the ranking are occupied by Baidu, Yahoo !, AOL, Excite, Ask.
What is popular in Russia
Among the search engines in Russia, Yandex is the most popular. This service appeared in 1997. At first, he was engaged in the Russian company CompTek International. A little later, the Yandex company appeared, which continued to engage in the search engine. The search engine over the years has gained immense popularity. It can be searched in several languages - in Russian, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Tatar, Kazakh, English, German, French, Turkish.
From statistical information it is known that Yandex is interesting to more than 50% of Runet users. Over 40% of people prefer Google. About 3% of users opted for Mail.ru - the Russian-language Internet portal.
Secure Search Engines
The usual search engines that are familiar to us are not entirely suitable for children. Young Internet users may accidentally find some adult materials, information that can harm the psyche. For this reason, special secure search engines have been created. Their databases store only safe content for children.
An example of one such search engine is Sputnik.Children. This service is quite young. It was created by Rostelecom in 2014. The main page of the search engine is brightly and interestingly framed. It presents a wide range of domestic and foreign cartoons for children of different ages. Additionally, on the main page there are informative links related to several categories - “Sports”, “I want to know everything”, “Do it yourself”, “Games”, “Technologies”, “School”, “Nature”.
Another example of a secure child search engine is Agakids.ru. This is an absolutely safe resource. How does a search engine work? The robot is configured in such a way that it bypasses only those sites that are related to children's topics or are useful for parents. Resources with cartoons, books, educational literature, games, coloring pages fall into the base of a search engine. Parents, using Agakids.ru, can find sites for themselves on the upbringing and health of their children.
In conclusion, it is worth noting that search engines are complex systems. They face many problems - problems of spam, determining the relevance of documents, filtering out poor-quality content, analyzing documents that do not contain textual information. For this reason, developers are introducing new approaches, algorithms that are a trade secret, into the work of Internet search engines.