A Critical Analysis Of The Most Popular Search Engines (Essay Sample)

A CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE MOST POPULAR SEARCH ENGINES
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The Internet has grown become the primary platform for information exchange. The World Wide Web is laden with tons of information which make it hard to find specific material of interest. However, with the help of search engines, the once challenging and frustrating process is nowadays easy and more accurate. A search engine is a program designed to locate and index web pages found on computers servers on the Web. There are hundreds of Web search programs available today. Even so, three search engines dominate the Web today namely Google, Bing and Yahoo Search.
Google Search is the most-used and most favored search engine. It is owned and managed by Google Inc. Google performs more than three billion searches a day through its various services. The listing of the search results on Google’s results page is based on a ranking algorithm known as PageRank. Google provides many options aimed at customized searching by the use of Boolean operators such as exclusion, wild-cards, and alternatives. Indeed, with these choices, a user can search for information based on the time, location or category. Although Google was initially designed to hunt for text in Web pages, the search engine provides other unique features. These include images, maps, synonyms, word definitions, weather, stock quotes, movies showtimes, airports, and weather forecasts. The simplicity of Google Search and the flexibility it provides arguably makes it the most preferred search software.[1. Mark Levene, An introduction to search engines and web navigation. (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 1.] [2. Amy Langville and Carl Meyer. Google's PageRank and beyond: The science of search engine rankings (Princeton University Press, 2011), 3.]
Yahoo Inc. owns Yahoo Search. As of January 2014, it was the second largest search directory on query and has a 13% of the search market. Initially, Yahoo provided an interface where queries were sent to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its list of websites. The results were then presented to the user under the Yahoo brand. Yahoo never carried out the actual web crawling and data retrieval. The searchable index was provided by Inktomi, and later on by Google until 2004, when Yahoo became independent. On July 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo signed a 10-year deal whereby Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, would power Yahoo search.[3. Greg McFarlane, “Google Vs. Bing Vs. Yahoo: The Search Engine Wars,” Investopedia, Accessed April 20, 2016, /articles/investing/070915/google-vs-bing-vs-yahoo-search-engine-wars.asp.] [4. Ibid.]
Closely following Yahoo Search is Bing Search, which is owned by Microsoft. Bing was unveiled in 2009, and it was formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN search. Microsoft’s previous search engine versions were not dedicated as Google and, therefore, could not stand the competition. Notable changes that Bing introduced are the listing of search suggestions while query terms were entered and a list of related searches based on semantic technology from Powerset. Microsoft had already purchased Powerset in 2008. Later on, Microsoft developed a new back-end search infrastructure known as “Tiger.” The new indexing technology delivered faster and slightly more relevant search results and has been incorporated into Bing globally. Another noteworthy feature in Bing is “Sidebar”, a social tool that looks up for information in users’ social networks that is relevant to the search query. Bing searches are done using the best match feature that filters results by their order of relevance, just as Google’s PageRank.[5. Cédric Arg...