Search engine

Search engines crawl websites, store content in the index, and deliver matching results to search queries. An algorithm evaluates relevance/quality (including content, links, technology, user signals) and sorts the results as SERPs.

What is a search engine and how does it work?

A search engine is, simply put, a computer program that allows you to search data sets on the internet for desired information. The search results appear in the form of links that can be clicked.

From the very beginning, search engines have always been the tools for internet users who generally know where they want to go but do not know the way. The functionality is essentially the same for all search engines. I have a field in which I enter my search query, a button to send this query for search, and then I receive the search results from the search engine.

How a search engine works

Search engines always work according to the same principle: All operators have a crawler, a bot that searches sites and compiles them into an index. Data such as URLs, the number of links, or the age of a website are collected. The search engine ultimately does not display a page itself, but only the link to it.

It is important for website operators to engage in SEO, or search engine optimization, so that they rank high in the SERPs, in the search results, and are clicked on by users on the web.

Every search engine has its own algorithms that determine which pages rank for which search terms. Many well-known and also many unknown factors contribute to how well one's own site performs. Professional SEO managers ensure that the website is optimized for the search engine.

The No.1 search engine: Google

Worldwide, there are well over a hundred different search engines, with the industry leader being Google, naturally, holding about 81% market share in Germany and about 84% market share globally by a large margin. In mobile search, Google has a market share of nearly 97% in Germany. Other prominent search engines include:

In Germany: Bing, Ecosia, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo

In Germany, Bing is considered the most important competitor for Google. By implementing the ChatGPT chatbot, Bing's search engine traffic has recently increased by 15%. Ecosia, on the other hand, is an ecological search engine that finances rainforest reforestation through its search engine revenues. The search engine delivers Bing search results. DuckDuckGo, on the other hand, advertises that no personal information is collected.

Furthermore, there are search engines that fall outside the normal grid and cater to a specific niche or segment. An example is blinde-kuh.de, the first German-language search engine for children.

Yandex and Baidu in Russia and China

Even though Google dominates almost every country in terms of market share, there are still a few "non-Googleized zones." Particularly in regions where different characters are used, such as Cyrillic, Google has difficulty penetrating the market for search engine results. Therefore, there are other dominant search engines: Yandex.ru in Russia and Baidu.com in China.

Incidentally, Google not only revolutionized and evolved user behavior on the internet with its search engine, but also laid the foundation for search engine marketing with its paid search model, Google Ads.