03 Apr 09 SEO SIMPLIFIED: What is “Search Engine”

We shall begin the second part of the SEO Simplified series with a definition of search engine and an explanation of how it works. A search engine is any program that searches documents for the keyword entered by the user, but in general, we use the term search engine in association with online portals like, Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Alta Vista, Excite, Lycos etc. From now onward in the series, whenever we use the term search engine, we will be referring to web search engines, like the ones listed above.

When you enter a keyword in the designated area of any of these search portals, the portal sends a program called spider out on the web to look for as many files with matching keywords as it can, and at the end (when gathering the data is complete), the search engine produces the result on the page, called Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The result is presented as a list of URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) that is ranked on the basis of relevance to the keyword searched for.

The image above shows how a typical search result looks line in SERP. The result was produced by Google against the keyword search engine. In the result above you can see that Google has highlighted the keyword search engine wherever it is mentioned. It has also highlighted the term search because I went for the broad match search option. If I had gone for phrase match (by putting the keyword(s) within quotes) then only “search engine” would have been highlighted.

The page in the result is optimized for the keyword “search engine,” by using the keyword in proper places like in the title, the URL and in the meta description. We will discuss these tags later in detail.

From its beginning, in 1993, with the launch of Aliweb to Gezzmo search of 2009, search engines have evolved significantly. Now the search results are more organic or algorithmic as opposed to the primarily human-input driven search results of the initial days, for example, Aliweb did not used any web spider or web robot to index web pages. The database of Aliweb was dependent on information provided by the web site administrator himself about the existence of his web site. Search engine business has come of age with the launch of today’s search Goliath, Google.com, in 1998.

As per the data of searches in February 2009, Google controls more than 60.3 percent of the worldwide search market, second to Google is Yahoo with 20.6 percent market share and with 8.2 percent, MSN is in the third position. There are some regional search engines (like Baidu in China, Guruji in India, Yandex in Russia, etc.) as well that collectively control a significant portion of the search market.

The 60 percent estimate given above is the most conservative one. In the actual consumer market Google has a far bigger share (more than 80 percent) of the search pie. MSN and Yahoo use the power of default to reach the figure estimated above. If you are a computer newbie that uses the in-built search box of the Internet Explorer and Flock browsers to meet your searching needs then you are using MSN and Yahoo respectively (as they are the default search engines for these browsers).

The actual market is when either a user types a search engines URL to fetch the result he or she wants or if the user is aware of which search engine he or she is using and why. That is why almost all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) activities are targeted primarily towards Google. Search business has gone niche now, but Google is still ruling the roost.