The three most widely used web search
engines and their approximate share as of
late 2010.
A web search engine is a tool designed to search for various sources of information that is located on the World Wide Web (www). The first such device used for searching on the Internet, came of age in 1990 and was simply called “Archie.” The World Wide Web’s second search engine was called “Aliweb” and appeared in November 1993.
Although the company “Google” was in existence as early as 1998, the “Search Engine” (Google Search) aspect didn’t appear until sometime in the year 2000, Google's search engine quickly rose to prominence. The company achieved better results from the public view most likely due to a new search concept (that later became there patented trademark) that was an innovation at the time called “PageRank.”
The way PageRank works (a nut shell version) ….. The web-site (‘site A’ for example) with the most links from other web-sites (sites B, C, and D), in this case to web-site ‘A’, receives a superior or better page ranking for the site. In other words, if web-site ‘A’ has 50 links to it from other web-sites and web- site ‘Z’ only 2 links from other sites; then web-site ‘A’ should be listed on the search page results as # 1 on page # 1; in turn web-site ‘Z’ may be listed as # 7 but on page # 7 of the search results.
In the year 2000, this thinking was considered innovative as well as fair. The result soon placed Google Search on the top of the heap by a huge margin as is depicted in the “usage share chart” above.
That all may sound like roses but now enter “Paid Inclusions” which is a search engine marketing process wherein the search engine company charges a fee related to placing a website in their search index or search pages. In other words, by paying a fee, you can get your web-site at the top or very near the top of every page listing, regardless of how many links you have to your site.
This is also called sponsored listings; paid inclusion web-sites are provided by almost all search engine companies, the most notable being none other than Google Search. In short if you are willing and able to spend a lot of money, no matter what you are advertising or perhaps selling in your web-site, you can reach the top of the heap quickly, even if you’re promoting rocks. In my view this type scenario gives the large corporatized companies an un-fair advantage.
Your first thoughts may be that such marketing tactics would result in fierce competition by the up and coming “little guys” such as Yippy, Dogpile, or DuckDuckGo; I looked at all three, and it appears that of the 3, DuckDuckGo, is the only one without sponsored links. They do have ads for items such as books from Amazon, but that is expected and may even be helpful as the book topic offered is usually related to your search topic in some way.
As Google, Yahoo, and Bing continue with the battle for the top of the search engine heap, we as search engine users need to consider the declining quality of all three. For this reason I plan to start today by utilizing the search engine service currently offered by DuckDuckGo, in the stead of Google Search.
Sources …
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