5 Top Search Engines‏

Search engines are known for their raw power to churn the web for information and get search results as per the query submitted. Major search engines mean a lot to webmasters and user’s. To webmasters being listed on these engines mean top traffic and visibility. For users, these engines provide most relevant search results and are fast in processing queries.

Search engines may be classified between crawlers and directories. Crawler based engines such as Google, crawl the web to index the pages to be stored in their repositories. Directories are dependent on their users to provide data of their listings. Webmaster's submit information about their websites into these directories to be listed in them. Editing web pages do not have an effect on directories, as they are not dependent on web page content. Directories are powered by their own rankings and reviews of websites.

The 5 top search engines by rank are:

1.      Google

The Google search engine is by far the most popular and effective search engine on the web. It is owned by Google Inc., which is a California based company. It was developed by two Stanford graduates, Larry Paige and Sergei Brin in 1997. It runs more than a hundred million search queries every day. Google’s web ranking system is based on a standard metric of linking pages. These pages are ranked according to relative importance. Google indexes all the pages it searches. It generates a database of the web pages it indexes. This database is stored for later retrieval during search queries.

A search query in Google is a keyword to be searched in the stored web page repositories. The queries are searched according to the occurrence of such terms in a web page. The more the occurrence of a search term in a web page, the more will be its relevance in the top results. To generate top search results the search engine has to query millions of its indexed web pages to obtain a successful result. Google’s search engine uses crawler’s to index web pages. These robots go about crawling every known website and webpage in existence.

Search engines based on Google and Google technology are:

·         AOL Search

·         CompuServe Search

·         MySpace Search  

·         Netscape

·         Ripple

2.Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search is owned by Yahoo Inc. It was the 2^nd largest search engine on the web after Google before June 2009. It was founded by two internet pioneers, Jerry Yang and David Filo in January 1994. On January 13, 2009, Yahoo! selected Carol Bartz to be its new chief executive officer. It attracts volume traffic of 1.5 billion people every year. Its website is as popular as its search engine. On February 1 2008, Microsoft made a takeover bid of Yahoo! In 2002, Yahoo! started making attempts to acquire other search engines. It acquired the Inktomi search engine. In 2003, it acquired Overture along with its sub companies AltaVista and AlltheWeb. Its searchable index was powered by Inktomi in 2001 and by Google till 2004. Its search since 2009 is powered by Microsoft’s Bing.

The official Yahoo! crawler is called Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo! merged the search technologies of all the companies it acquired to build its search results. It also sold these results to other search engines. In 2004, they severed their search partnership with Google and became its main competitor. In 2007, it added the SearchAssist function to provide real time query suggestions. In 2008, Yahoo! Search declared its new service BOSS or “Build Your Own Search Engine”. This service lets developers use the Yahoo! Search index for use in their own websites and applications. In 2009, it signed a deal with Microsoft, which resulted in Yahoo! Search being powered by Bing.

Search engines based on Yahoo! and Yahoo! technologies are:

• AltaVista
• AlltheWeb
• Ecocho
• Forestle (an ecologically motivated site supporting sustainable rain forests)
• GoodSearch
• Rectifi

3.Bing (Previously MSN Live Search)

Bing is the current search engine from Microsoft. It is the replacement for the Live! Search search engine from Microsoft. Some of many features include real time search suggestions. Another feature is the explorer pane on the left side of the search results. This is based on the Semantic Technology from Powerset. Yahoo! Search is powered by Bing’s search technology. Bing’s search predecessors include MSN Search. It was launched in 1998 and was powered by Inktomi. Its index used to be updated weekly or even daily. Windows Live Search was launched in 2006. It was about to service the more then 2.5 billion search queries each month more improved and precise.

Search engines based on Bing and Bing technology are:

• A9.com
• Alexa Internet
• Tafiti
• Ms. Dewey

4.Ask - Powered by Teoma

Ask or Ask Jeeves is a search engine developed by Garett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley in 1996. Jeeves is a valet and fictional character from P.G.Wodehouse’s works.  Ask has a binocular preview that lets searchers have a sneak peak of the page they would be visiting. The AskEraser feature removes all traces of search history. In 2008, Ask completed the acquisition of Reference.com. Reference.com owns Dictionary.com, Thesaurus.com and Reference.com. It has combined visitors of 28 million. It is branded as Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom and sports a 3D image of the fictional character. Ask also provides a toolbar. It lets users search the web, images, news and the dictionary.

Search engines based on Ask and Ask technology are:

• Hakia (semantic search)
• iWon
• Lycos

5.AOL Search - Powered by Google

AOL is a Time Warner company operated from New York. It was founded as Quantum Computer Services in 1983. It has the AOL software suite. This software suite allows millions of user to communicate in the AOL community. It had a peak membership of 30 million users. On August 4, 2006 AOL released a list of 20 million search keywords for its 650,000 users for a 3 month period for research purposes. This has resulted in the infamous AOL data scandal involving some researchers at AOL. The company is accused of exposing user information such as Social Security, home addresses, etc in search results. AOL search is totally powered by Google’s search technology.