A search engine is a software system that is designed to carry out web searches (Internet searches), which means to search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs) The information may be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files.
Search engines work through three primary functions
Crawling: Scour the Internet for content, looking over the code/content for each URL they find.
Indexing: Store and organize the content found during the crawling process. Once a page is in the index, it’s in the running to be displayed as a result to relevant queries.
Ranking: Provide the pieces of content that will best answer a searcher’s query, which means that results are ordered by most relevant to least relevant.
Besides providing useful information for their users, search engines can also help brands to promote their websites.
Optimizing your website for the relevant search queries is an important part of any online marketing strategy since it can drive more traffic to your webpages.
The sum of all the practices and techniques the website owners do to improve their search rankings is (SEO).
The main source of revenue for search engines like Google comes from various indirect sources. Search engines can monetize their services via:
- Advertisement – Google uses its own advertisement service called Google Ads thanks to which it can help brands to display their products in the search results and in return takes a small commission every time a user clicks on the ad.
- Online shopping – search engines can promote various products in their enhanced search results. If a user clicks or buys one of the products, the search engine will in exchange take a small percentage from the purchase.
- Services – Google incorporates its services (e.g. Play Store, Google Cloud, Google Apps, etc.) with its own search engine and therefore generates revenue via customers who use them.
Search Engines – Google, Microsoft bing, Yahoo, Baidu.
