critical analysis of the popular search engines (Research Paper Sample)

Critical Analysis of Most Popular Search Engines First Name Last Name Course Name Instructor’s name Date A search engine is a program, based on the World Wide Web database, used to locate and identify details that match the keywords or user specified characters to give back documents where the key terms were found. Normally, Web search engines work by sending out a computer program, spider; that scans through the web looking for publicly accessible resources that can be added to a database. Another program, an indexer, then reads through the resources added to the database creating indexes on basses of words contained in each document.[. Hoover, Steven. Hunter S. Thompson and Gonzo Journalism: A Research Guide. Digital Scholarship@UNLV, 2009. <http://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/lib_articles/107>.] Proprietary algorithms, complex mathematical formula, are used by every browser to make its indices such that only results corresponding to user’s results are returned for each query. Search engines are relied upon by many website owners to send traffic to their sites, and the whole industry has developed around the theme of making optimal web content to better the results the results gotten by the user. The history of search engines dates’ way back to the year 1990 when the Archie search engine created by Alan Emtage was launched to present times where most advanced search engines which include: Google, Yahoo, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Quora among hundreds of others have been developed. Statistics has it that Google search engine is the best search engine all over the world, and it tops within the ranks of Google’s products. It is estimated that Google has dominated about 70 percent of the search engine market. Its popularity is attributed to its constant trials to improve the search engine algorithm to provide best results to the end-user.[. Zhang, Zhiyong. Focused Image Search in the Social Web. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Louisville, 2008, 2008.] Bing, Microsoft’s answer to Google, launched in the year 2009 is also an excellent search engine. Bing is Microsoft’s web browser, default search Engine. Despite the constant efforts by the team behind Bing to make it a better search engine, it still comes after Google. The Bing search engine offers different services including video, image and web search along with maps. Yahoo! Search, a web search engine owned by YAHOO! Is the third largest search engine in the United States, this is after Google and Bing. Initially, "Yahoo Search" commonly referred to as Yahoo provided an interface that sent queries to searchable indexes of pages supplemented with its directory of websites. The results were then availed to the end- user under the Yahoo! brand. Both Yahoo and being are not out to challenge Google but to compete against each other. According to the net-market-share latest report, Yahoo has a market share of 9.57 percent. Yahoo still leads among the most known free mail providers but still unable to convince users in search engine area.[. Szetela, David, and Joseph Kerschbaum. Pay-Per-Click Search Engine Marketing: An Hour a Day. Indianapolis, Ind: Wiley, 2010. <http://site.ebrary.com/id/10411476>.] Baidu, a Chinese search engine founded in 1st January 2000, is made to deliver results for the website, images and audio files. Alexa, traffic data, and analytics compan...