A Critical Analysis of the Most Popular Search Engines (Essay Sample)

A Critical analysis of the most popular search engines.
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A search engine is in essence a computer program that helps users to locate information on the World Wide Web. Search engines are a very effective and efficient mode of finding information. The results relayed by search engines vary from one search engine to the next due to content, size, speed and ranking criteria used by specific search engines. Search engines are of various types which include automatic, directories and Meta .Automatic search engines are based on the information collected and analyzed by crawlers. They are easy to use, contain huge amount of information and are widely used compared to other types. On the other hand directories are powered and compiled by human editors who in essence decide solely on what to list and in what categories. The most popular search engines are Google, Bing and yahoo.[Brin, Sergey, and Lawrence Page. "Reprint of: The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine." Computer networks 56, no. 18 (2012): 3825-3833.] [Brin, Sergey and Lawrence, 2012,3828]
The Google search web engine is owned by Google Inc. which is an American multinational technology company specializing in Internet-related services and products. It is the most widely used search engine due to its simplistic design and relevant results. The search engine has the largest market share compared to other popular search engines. Google is designed to crawl and index the Web efficiently to give more satisfying and relevant search results than existing systems. In Google web crawling is done by distributed crawlers to which URLs are fetched and sent to the store server. The data structures are optimized so that a huge document collection can be crawled, indexed, and searched efficiently.[Shih, Bih‐Yaw, Chen‐Yuan Chen, and Zih‐Siang Chen. "An empirical study of an internet marketing strategy for search engine optimization." Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries 23, no. 6 (2013): 528-540.]
Bing is a search engine owned by the Microsoft Corporation. It is a replacement of live search after it was rebranded by Microsoft. Live search was deemed uncompetitive and thus the rebranding to Bing. Bing is available for use worldwide but gives different results for different parts of the world. Bing powers Apple’s and Yahoo’s search results. Bing has earned itself a relative market share but it is still far behind Google in terms of market share and brand equity as well.
Yahoo search is a Web search engine operated by Yahoo. It is the largest mail service provider under Yahoo Mail. The search engine is powered by Bing and has a portal that provides latest news to users, sports and entertainment information. This in essence means that Yahoo uses results from Bing search engine. In as much as the search engine provides a variety of services to its users, it still does not have a relatively large market share compared to its leading competitor Google. It is however deemed the largest news provider compared to other search engines. In comparison to the three most popular search engines Yahoo search has the least market share.[Ozcan, Rifat, I. Sengor Altingovde, B. Barla Cambazoglu, Flavio P. Junqueira, and ÖZgüR Ulusoy. "A five-level static cache architecture for web search engines." Information Processing & Management 48, no. 5 (2012): 828-840.] [Mele, 2013,7...