What is a Search Engine?

As the name suggests the search engine is a tool which helps find information on the internet. One has always been in trouble at some point of time or other for being disorganized with his or her stuff. Many a times we would scour the entire room or a stack of files to find one paper.

We are so lost with one room of papers, imagine sieving through the entire world wide web to get an information.

The most recent information on the number of web pages is about 120 billion web pages on the world wide web. To put the same in digits we are talking about 120,000,000,000 web pages. We understand of this number because only last week did Cuil a new search engine founded by former google employees was launched with this number. Google, although does not disclose their count of indexed web pages, claim that they have about 1 trillion unique web pages.

Anyways, the numbers aside, imaging the amount of trouble you will have to go through millions and millions of web pages to find something you want. That is a herculean task ain't it.
So to simplify life these search engines were developed. Search engines have an entire list of web pages and the information on these web pages and their content.

It is not that the moment you have your website, it will be listed (Indexed) in the search engines. To have your website listed the search engines need to know that your website exists. There are two types of search engines

Crawler based Search Engines

These type of search engines use a bot or spider. What a spider does is crawl through your website to list the various pages and index the same on the search engine. Google is one such crawler based search engine

Human powered Directories
These types of search engines where you submit your website to the directory and the same listed on the search engine. These types of search engines would only list the websites that is being submitted to them. Open directory is one such type of search engine.

There is also these hybrid search engines which use both the crawlers and the directories to index pages. We will see more about various search engines and submitting to them in the posts to come.Subscribe to more such posts by Email