Atelier Studios

Internet Search engines help users find web pages related to their specified search term. Web search engines will crawl sites and mine data from a range of sources to determine results that their unique algorithms consider to be the most relevant and contain quality information.

The first search engine was Aliweb launched (miraculously) in 1993 and it was a very basic search that only scanned the titles of pages. Google rose to prominence in 2000 as it contained an innovation known as page rank. This centred on assessing the links into the site on the basis that the most relevant and quality sites will have more links than the lesser sites.

Google is by far the most powerful search engine on the web and is easily the most popular in the west. However Baidu is the most popular search engine in China and is growing year on year (however the Internet is heavily censored in China so this may not be down to the prominence of the search engine).

Search engines work initially on the basis of using its Robots crawling the site and places the content into its index (much like a library).

When the user types in a certain search query, the search engine will look through its index and then return the most relevant results to the search terms entered.

There are advanced features on the site such as proximity searches that define how far you are willing to have the keywords apart. Revenue in the web search portals industry is projected to grow in 2008 by 13.4 percent, with broadband connections expected to rise by 15.1 percent.