What is a Search Engine? – Definition, Different Search Engines, and More

Search Engine Definition

Search engines are the central point of contact for all information seekers on the internet.

It search the internet based on a user’s search query and display the corresponding hits in a list from a technical point of view.

General search engines are suitable for searching the entire internet. Exceptional services and business search engines are designs for searches focusing on a specific area of information.

Supplier search engines are geared towards finding suppliers of products and services in business-to-business (B2B).

There are also other types of search engines such as meta search engines and local search engines.

Different Search Engine approaches

• Some of the major search engines like Google, Bing, and Baidu index a large part of the web.
• It also provides search results that would otherwise be overwhelming to search due to the internet’s size.
• Specialized content search engines select which part of the web is crawled and indexed.
• For example, specific TechTarget sites will only index pages related to these products and provide a shorter but more targeted list of results.
  Some search engines allow you to enter a search query in natural languages, such as: What is the weather like today?
• Special tools and some large websites make it possible to use several search engines simultaneously and compile the results in a single list.
• Individual websites, significantly larger corporate websites, can use a search engine to index and pull their own website’s content.
• Some major search engine companies license or sell their search engines for use on individual websites.

Where to look

1. Several hundred search engines around the world are publicly accessible and generally available to Internet users.
2. Simultaneously, there are about ten major search engines, each with its homepage – although some have an agreement to use another web site’s search engine or to license their search engine for use by other websites.
3. Some pages search with their search engine and return the results of searches of other search indexes.
4. Yahoo, for example, first searches its own hierarchically structured subject directory and delivers these entries.
5. There were also entries from the AltaVista search engine until mid-2013.
6. At the same time, it looked for entries that matched six or seven other major search engines.
7. Today, Yahoo uses Bing’s search engine.
8. If one looks at the distribution of search engines’ use, the following picture emerges in Germany.
9. Google dominates the market with a market share of around 90 percent. With about seven percent, Microsoft’s Bing follows in second place.
10. Yahoo and T-Online rank behind with about one percent.
11. Worldwide, Google leads the list of search engines with around two-thirds of search queries.
12. Baidu, Bing, and Yahoo each account for approximately ten percent of global search queries.

How to Search

• For tips on entering search arguments, you should look at the hints of search engines, for example, on Google.
• However, a general search approach is to try how many search engines push when to stop the search.
• It isn’t easy to generalize, but here are a few helpful tips to help you find it.
• If you know a specialized search engine, like on the TechTarget pages, that fits a topic (e.g., enterprise software or networking), you save time using the site’s search engine.
  If there isn’t a specialized search engine, try Google or Bing. Sometimes you can find a matching result or two, which is often enough.
• If Google is not enough, try other search engines and their results. Depending on how important the search is, the first 20 entries are usually sufficient.
• For an efficient search, you can use a metasearch engine that uses several search engines simultaneously and searches their indices.
• If you haven’t found the correct result at this point, you should use a topic directory approach.
• You should look at Google or the structured topic categories of other search engines and see if you can narrow down a type in which the term or phrase is likely to be found.
• If nothing else is possible, you can come up with ideas for new search phrases.
• You can also search Usenet newsgroups if you deem it necessary.
• While searching, keep thinking about the search arguments. Which new approaches can be uses? What are related topics for search?
• Finally, consider whether the topic is so new that not much is available about it yet.
• If so, one may need to find the latest publications, research institutes, or companies engaged in research or development related to the subject.