What Are Search Engines

It wasn’t that long ago that if you needed to find a business or a service, you picked up the yellow pages and let your fingers do the walking. Now the internet has taken over and even yellow pages are visited more online that through the printed page.

So the natural way to find just about anything in the 21st century is to first visit a search engine, enter what you are looking for and hope that the technology and calculations behind the website will deliver you on screen what you are looking for.

Well that is the principle anyway. But in reality when we action a search we often find different results and so the users tend to have their favourite search engine because of previous success. The big 3 search engines are Google Yahoo and live (aka MSN owned my Microsoft). All 3 use different algorithms (calculations) to deliver the search results, hence different information.

In the war within these 3, Google is winning by a mile, even though they are the newest in the market. It is believed they have around 56% of the total search market within the USA, but this figure increases dramatically in certain other countries. The story of Google is phenomenal, making one of the world’s most successful ventures and to some in the search engine optimization industry or where their income relies on search engine placement, world domination.

Yahoo is normally placed second, still quite and achievement and seems to have a dedicated following. Just as Google is successful, following up just behind yahoo is Live, which considering is supplied automatically with XP or Vista operation system, which is on most of the worlds computers, and owned an run by Microsoft, it is surprising how little progress against the other 2 it has made, even with substantial investment.

To be good at search engine optimization you have to understand how each of these search engines work. A quality seo company will do this every day, consistently keeping abreast all changes. Take Google for example; in 2007 they implemented over 450 changes to their algorithm. In short what looks like simple websites, are in fact a directory of the world. But for you seo guy out there, there is only 10 results that matter and that is the first 10 results on the first page of any search result, nothing else should matter.