What is Search Engine?

A search engine is a information database system that helps users find websites they are looking for on the web. As a user you can go to one of many search engines on the web, for this discussion we will use Google, type in what you are searching for in the search box and hit enter and Google will provide a list of all results that meet your needs. Some sites will be relevant and others won’t be. You could get as many a million search results for one topic. When using the search engine you don’t have to have a specific thing you are looking for in order to get results. For example, let’s say you want information dogs, but you don’t have anything specific yet you want to see. Type in the word dog and the search engine will back millions of results all pertaining to the word dog. It is up to you to either narrow your search or simply wade through the millions of sites pertaining to dogs.

The very first idea for searching the web was created in the 1990’s it was called Archie which was the word archive without the v. The program’s purpose was to download all of the files stored on the internet through FTP which is File Transfer Protocol. As Archie was being used to index computer files another program called Gopher was set up in 1991. Most of the files on the web were text files, Gopher’s sites became sites after the discovery of the World Wide Web. Over time tow other programs became available, one was called the Veronica which really meant Very Easy Rodent Oriented Net wide Index to Computerized Archives and the Jughead which stood for Jonzy’s Universal Gopher hierarchy Excavation And Display.

These programs were used as tools to get menu information from many different Gopher servers. The very first search engine was called Wandex which is no longer used, it was developed in 1993. The other search engine that was created in 1993 is called the Aliweb and it is still used today as a search engine. As the web become more prominent more and more search engines appeared and competed for traffic. It wasn’t until Google came on the scene in 1998 when the search engine craze went into overdrive. Google, Yahoo and MSN are the top three search engines on the World Wide Web today.

In 2001, Google began it’s ascent into being the most popular search engine. The popularity was mainly caused by how Google indexed their sites. They used link popularity as well as a PageRank system. Some of the problems facing search engines are that the web is growing more and more everyday, thousands and thousand of sites are popping up everyday. Search engines are not as fast they used to be when it comes to indexing the sites because of the quantity of sites.

Another problem facing search engines is that some of the search engines are having problems with relevancy. They have a hard time getting the information the users requested. Many times search engines don’t rank their sites by the subject matter but how well a site is done. There are even some search engines that rank their sites by how much money the matching site is willing to pay. A problem for site crawlers that search engines sent out can not look at the content on secure pages for technical reason or because they don’t want it index for privacy. As the web continues to grow, the use for search engines grow with it.