Search engines: what are they and how do they work?

Making queries in search engines is a daily task to find products, services and even answers to all kinds of questions. They are used as if they were a kind of oracle with the solutions for the problems of every day.

One of the most popular search engines is undoubtedly Google, however there are many more search engines. In this post we will tell you more about its history, what types of search engines exist, as well as how it works. In this post we will address the following topics:

• What is a search engine
• Types of search engines
  • Hierarchical
  • Directory
  • Metasearch engines
• Internet search engines
  • Search engine history
  • Difference with web browsers
• How hierarchical search engines work
  • What is a crawler or web spider
  • What is an algorithm
• What is the best search engine
  • Google Search
  • DuckduckGo
  • Ecosia
  • Bing
  • Ask
  • Baidu
• About Search Engine Optimization

What is a search engine?

It is a computer system that searches for files stored in directories, lists, or on web servers. Some search only on the web, but others also search news, services like Gopher, FTP, etc. People make queries on these engines through search terms or keywords; the search result can come from different sources.

Types of search engines

There are three types of search engines, they are classified according to how they obtain information and return it to users when they make a query.

Hierarchical

Some examples are the search engines Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, among others, which explore and categorize the information they find on the web. When a user makes a query, they return the information that is most accurate or closest to the answer they are looking for.

Hierarchical search engines search for files stored on web servers, through their crawlers, robots or “web spiders”, that is, programs that constantly search for new pages on the Internet.

Directory

Possibly these are the oldest search engines, since they consist of lists classified by categories. Many of them used to be printed and distributed. For example, we could consider Sección Amarilla as a directory example.

Moving on to the digital realm, the IMBD movie database and Wikipedia are also search engines of this type. Social media search engines such as Instagram, Twitter, among others can be classified in this category. Even Amazon’s search engine is of this type, since it only returns the list of the products it has in its index.

Metasearch engines

For their part, metasearch engines collect information from various search engines and deliver the results to users in an orderly manner. They have been subclassified into:

• Tourist: TripAdvisor and SkyScanner offer the results of the prices of different airlines on a single page so that the user can select the best prices. On the first page, the results of the hotel rooms are also displayed.
• Of employment: Indeed displays results of jobs posted from multiple sources, on a single page. It even allows comparisons between the salaries offered for each position.
• General: Dogpile sends the query to other sites like Google or Bing to analyze and sort the results.

Since the most used search engines today are the hierarchical type and, in general, they are the ones of greatest interest for carrying out an SEO strategy, we will delve more about them.

Internet search engines

Before going into this topic, it is necessary to talk about the World Wide Web, which you probably already know as WWW o W3. It is the world wide computer network, which allows us to transmit data through information transfer protocols called HTTP. Said plain and simple, it is a system regulated by the World Wide Web Consortium institution, which issues recommendations and standards for the growth of the web.

Internet pages began to have a boom in the 90s of the last century. So the World Wide Web, founded by computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, launched a couple of projects to organize the information that was being generated on the Internet.

What is the difference between a search engine and a web browser?

Both are tools to connect to the Internet. The search engine is the system that allows you to search for content using queries, terms or keywords, and returns the results that, according to its algorithm, are most relevant. For its part, the web browser is the software installed on a computer, mobile phone or any other electronic device that can easily access the Internet through search engines.

Some companies have their own search engines and browsers, for example:

• Chrome is the web browser designed by Google, which has its own search engine.
• Microsoft has Edge as a web browser, this company also has a search engine called Bing.
• Brave is a web browser and search engine based on Chromium.

Other web browsers do not have their own search engine:

• Safari is the web browser designed by Apple, which is installed on all of its devices and whose use is restricted to the ecosystem of Apple products.
• Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation that can be used on any device.
• Opera is a web browser that uses the Blink search engine (rendering engine created by Google).

And of course, there are search engines whose company has not developed its own browser, such is the case of Ecosia. It should be noted that although web browsers come with default search engines, in most cases these can be changed in settings.

Another factor of interest when choosing a web browser has to do with the privacy practices it has.

How do hierarchical search engines work?

Hierarchical search engines, as we have already seen, are currently very popular for finding any type of information on the Internet. These work through web crawlers and have an algorithm to deliver the results to the queries of the Internet users.

What is a crawler or web spider?

web crawlers, robots, spiders or web spiders are programs that automatically analyze Internet pages. Its objective is to track the web, that is, to collect information from these sites, see and follow their links. After they collect this data, they feed their directories and index these sites.

Subsequently, when an Internet user makes a query through a web browser, they return the results they consider most relevant. In this video you can learn more about how it works:

In the previous example, they explain how a specific search engine (Google’s) works. Although all hierarchical search engines work like this in general terms, the rules for determining which are the most relevant results to return when a user makes a query are different from one search engine to another. These rules are known as algorithms.

What is an algorithm?

An algorithm is a series of steps to solve a problem. For example, when we perform a multiplication with several digits, step one is to accommodate the two digits one above the other; the second step is to multiply the first digit on the right, of the amount placed at the bottom by the digits at the top; the third is to repeat step two but now with the second digit from the bottom from right to left and so on until concluding with all the digits at the bottom; finally, the resulting quantities are added and in this way the result is obtained.

If you think about it, there is more than one way to solve a multiplication; For example, if the multiplication is by a multiple of ten, it is enough to just move the decimal point, in this way the problem is solved faster.

And this is the mission of the algorithms of the big companies that have search engines: to solve the problem. In this case, return the most relevant information to the user when they make their query. That is why algorithms are secrets that only the companies that develop them know, and each company makes its own methods to consider which information is most important.

What is the best search engine?

Currently, the popularity of search engines varies from one country to another. While in countries like Mexico the main search engine is Google, in Russia the Yandex search engine is number one and in China they use the Baidu search engine. Answering the question of which is the best search engine will depend on each person and their preferences.

Here we present some search engines and mention some features, so you can make the best decision when configuring your default searches:

Google

This is the most used search engine in most countries and receives hundreds of millions of queries every day through its different services. The main objective of the Google search engine is to search for text on web pages, instead of other types of data.

Despite its popularity, it has poor privacy practices: it doesn’t block third-party tracking cookies by default, it doesn’t block cryptomining scripts, and it doesn’t block social trackers either. This is not necessarily a bad thing, it could be useful in case you like to see personalized ads.

DuckDuckGo

This engine is focused on privacy, it has been growing for years as a solid alternative to search engines like Google or Bing, unlike these, it does not track its users or segment them for advertising purposes.

Ecosia

It differs because with the income they obtain from the ads they place in the queries made by Internet users on it, they plant trees in more than thirty countries, including Brazil, Indonesia, Spain, among others.

Bing

It is Microsoft’s search engine, includes a list of search suggestions in real time and a list of related searches, uses semantic technology.

Ask

As its name indicates, the format with which this search engine was originally developed was the question and answer format; however, it now also allows traditional keyword searches, and aims to make searches more intuitive than with other search engines.

Baidu

In Chinese, his name means “hundred times.” This engine has a similar design to Google and includes the possibility of searching for news, images and songs, among other functions. As a curious fact, its name comes from a classical Chinese poem by the poet Xin Qiji, during the Song Dynasty, about a man who was looking for the love of his life.

About Search Engine Optimization

Since Internet browsers or search engines have gained so much popularity, there are currently professionals who are dedicated to improving the positioning of content in these tools. What can be done in Search Engine Optimization or SEO has been divided into:

• SEO On Site. The things that can be done within a site such as setting up tags and technical factors so that search engines index it correctly.
• SEO Off Site: A series of actions that are performed off the site to drive traffic to it. For example, the use of social media and what is known as link building.

In conclusion…

• Currently we use search engines to find any type of information and solve our daily problems.
• There are various types of search engines, the most popular being hierarchical.
• Hierarchical search engines inspect the web for new content, with programs called crawlers  or web spiders.
• Using their algorithms, search engines classify the information they have found, index it in their directories, and return it to Internet users when they make a query through a web browser.
• There is no such thing as “the best search engine”, since that depends on the characteristics that each Internet user values most.
• Since Internet searches are so popular, companies must invest in methods to appear in the top positions of search engines.