What Are Search Engines?

A search engine can be defined as a group of various programs, which are basically used in order to make a search about a specific topic of user’s interest. For most of people, search engine is just an internet application, with the help of which they can look for specific information on the internet. But search engines are not only online applications, this term can also be applied to various offline utilities like library catalog, catalog of collections of a museum, catalog of an exclusive electronics showroom etc. In most simple terms, it can be concluded that Search engines display and organize the information in a special way, which finally makes it easy to access by the users. So, search engine is a user friendly application.

Major aspects of search engines
The three major aspects of the search engines are- indexing, searching and crawling, when a search engine makes crawling, then it basically search for some new information which was not present or displayed during the previous crawl. It includes the updates to the web pages and files. In next step, the search engine index that information, it highlights specifically mentioned keywords in order to categorize the information. In fact on the internet, search about a topic is strictly dependent on the use of specific keywords. After indexing of the information, further information about the path of accessing gets stored in the database. Various search engines cache/store the searched information in order to make it easy to retrieve. When you provide a specific keyword to a search engine, then it uses that provided keyword to search the relative articles. For example- in Gemini geeks, when you type a keyword “genetic engineering”, then Gemini geeks will display all the articles relative to genetic engineering. This feature is extremely helpful for the users.

Keyword searching
Almost all the search engines, work on a same principal, but their specific usefulness can vary a lot. Actually working of the search engines depends upon complicated algorithms. Search engines use these algorithms to rank the relevance/priorities of their results (in the cases of common keywords). Moreover, the method of displaying the results and ability to generate more relative results distinguishes the usefulness of various search engines. Most popular search engines are- Yahoo!®, AltaVista®, Google® and Lycos®.

Google®
Google® is the most popular search engine of the world. It is a direct presenter of the internet searching. In fact under the effect of Google®, internet searching is also known as “googling”. In stead of using the word “search” people use the word “Google”.
Apart from Google, many other search engines are also present. These are yahoo search, msn search, dogpile, altavista, cuil and many more. But none of them is able to become as strong as the Google brand.

Almost all the search engines are intelligent in nature; they learn the nature of users and display results according to the needs of users. Search engines are able to display all the possible information on a topic with in seconds. If internet is the ocean of knowledge then a search engine is like a sailing ship of this ocean.

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