Search engine becomes an integral part of our daily life as it acts as the gateway to bring the whole world in the grip. There are millions of websites on the internet, e-commerce stores to buy products online, video platforms and so on. But all we need is a search engine before entering the world where everything can get within a moment.
Actually, in the world of smartphones and the internet, there is no one who doesn’t know about search engines. Even the little 5 years old kids got some tricky sense of search engine like google and also grew with the potential sense of how to use the search engine.
We all use search engines every day but how many of us properly know about search engines, their types and how do they work? Truly, there come a lot of things when talking about search engines. And if you start to discuss, you can’t end a day or twice.
The search engine is a broad and aged issue that has an illustrious past history with a tremendous journey that started from scratch. It is quite easy to understand that there are a lot of differences between the present and the past search engines.
However, in this article, we have discussed the different types of search engines that could help you to enrich your knowledge in this regard and will help you get so much information that you may have not before. So, why the delay, lets jump straight into the topic here below,
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Various types of search engines
Since the internet has become the primary source of getting information these days, you can’t ignore it anyhow. Search engines in this regard act as the door through which you can conserve the information you need.
The search engine has got an evolution that makes it become the present search engine, versatile and responsive. Today, online business, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, pay per click, digital marketing, online advertising are some of the words that conduct most of our online activity.
Social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and video sharing platforms like YouTube are some extreme additions in this regard.
According to the system and procedure of functionalities, there are four major types of search engine we have found to let you know, they are,
- Crawler/spider-based search engine
- Human directory-based search engine
- Metasearch engine
- Hybrid search engine
Here is a brief of all sorts of search engines which will inform about the functionality and other attributes of these search engines.
What is a Crawler/Spider based search engine?
Well, we are now quite upward in the discussion about search engines and the first thing we have found is the crawler-based search engine. If you are an enthusiast and come here to gather knowledge about some search engine terms, then you may be familiar with the word crawler/spider.
But do exactly know what a web crawler is? Simply put, a crawler is an automatic search engine which is also called a web crawler, spider, or spider bot. So, it is an internet bot and like its name, it crawls over the World Wide Web because of its duty.
You may get wonder by the word ‘Duty’ and feel to ask a question like what type of duty it has done. It is smooth to say that every system is developed for a specific purpose and the development keeps running until it fulfills the demand so that it’s being created.
Similarly, web crawlers also have a reason behind it, and without a single doubt, it is doing the best job and maintaining the relevancy of the internal system. This is why these pretty smart bots get the name because crawling is the proper term for the system which automatically works on the web for collecting resources and data.
However, search engines that use a web crawler or spider bot to crawl over the search engine and indexing new content are simply known as crawler based search engines.
Among the other types of search engines, crawler based are most popular and used widely at present. In the next part, we will get to know other search engine types when we can illustrate the perspective difference between them.
Here are some of the search engines run by the system,
- Bing
- Baidu
- Yahoo
How does a web crawler work?
Basically, the main work of web crawlers is to roam over the World Wide Web for searching new content, web pages simply everything in a search engine. For example, search engine Google has its own spider bot called Googlebot which works to find out new things all the way.
Consistently, web crawlers don’t end up just finding content, it used to download or index those contents into the database of the search engine. Thus, the search results that we got for particular search queries are some kind of indexed data preserved by the web crawler.
Although there is a systematic way that is followed by the web crawlers to do their job. Spiderbot starts the work by downloading the robot.txt file of the webpage. The robot.txt is a text file that is used to convey crawlers to speed up the indexing process.
A website contains a heap of contents with a wide internal linking structure. When a crawler first landed on the website, it did nothing but look for the robot.txt file. Because the file contains the instruction of how the crawler should crawl the website roaming over all the links that exist on the website.
This is an initial task and it should be ensured by the webmasters to make it easier for the crawler by including a robot.txt file on the web.
However, the crawler can identify all sorts of hyperlinks and HTML code! Today, most webmasters have a similar aim which is persuading the crawler to quickly index their new pages. They try all sorts of things to keep this from happening.
Fortunately, present crawler systems are so smart that they can easily crawl 100 times more pages than it was crawled before. There was a time when showing search results took so long for a single search query. But today, we get any information we have asked to google within a moment because those resources are previously stored after the indexing.
What is Human directory based search engine?
We live in a world where google concedes almost 90% of the search engine share market and the name is as popular as when we think about the internet we think about google. Thus, we used to say ‘google search’ or ‘Google it’ to recommend others when searching resources online.
Surely said, more than half of the internet users don’t know about search engines which can be automated by humans, not robots. Even they can’t think about it. But behind the scenes, there are directories which are still run by humans.
So, it is clear that human directory based search engines are simply controlled by human stuff. Therefore, all the search engine activities, which are controlled by the robot on as usual search engines, are completed by humans in directory based search engines.
So, how does it actually work? As there is no crawler or spider bot to crawl or index content, webmasters have to submit their content in the directory. And then, it will wait for editorial approval.
In human directory search engines, every content checks out by all kinds of stuff carefully. So, there are no chances of creating harmful websites like porn websites. In this way, directories are index websites organized by different categories.
Are the searching systems similar to crawler based search engines? Remember, when you are searching for resources in directories, you have to make sure that the website is approved and included in the server of the directory.
Types of directory
There are different types of directories based on the proposition and assets they offered. For instance,
General web directories
General web directories come with all sorts of subjects covered. They are not selective and don’t tend to evaluate websites according to their quality. General web directories are huge in size and are able to hold millions of web pages into them.
Academic web directories
These types of directories are used to cover mostly academic and discipline subject-related content. Academic web directories are sometimes too selective to approve content and only academic resources will be allowed to include it. Academic web directories are commonly not so huge in the size but that won’t create a controversial issue because here content quality is more prioritized than quantity.
Subject/Niche web directories
These web directories are formulated for a specific subject or focused on selective niches. For instance, best of history websites, Psychcentral and FindLaw are some of the niche based web directories that depict the area that is covering.
So, this type of web directories is quite selective and can be limited or unlimited in size.
Here are some human directory based search engines to make you clear about them,
- Yahoo Directory – whoever doesn’t hear the name of the Yahoo directory, it started the journey as a particular web search engine in 1994. At that time, yahoo came as a directory when other search engine terms weren’t as popular as now. And yahoo still going on with its directory for a non-refundable $299 review fee
- BOTW – the abbreviation stands for best of the web which is considered one of the best general web directories. As a listing of the best on the web, BOTW launched in 1994. It shows search results that are granted by human staff and more likely to refuse the approval request if that doesn’t match their terms and conditions. Whatever, it takes $150 annually
- DMOZ – DMOZ is popular enough and comes first when there is talking about web directories. It became the largest open web directory project when Netscape bought it in October 1998. But the project was launched by Gnuhoo in 1998.
- Also, there are some other web directories that differentiate from their working category like business.com, GoGuides, Wow directory, Alive, etc.
Metasearch engine
A metasearch engine is an extreme type of search engine that is used to provide a summation of results gathered from different web search engines. When displaying search results, it creates the ranking, categorizing, and then provides information to the users.
It is easy to understand that Metasearch engines don’t come with any personal database of their own indexing web pages. Its main job is aggregating resources from other search engines and then showing them to users.
The first Metasearch engine was the MetaCrawler implemented by the students of the University of Washington in 1995. Though there was another history found of being the first Metasearch engine named SearchSavy which counted as the encouragement for MetaCrawler.
Until then, there were so many Metasearch engines developed. Its system also updated over time and now Metasearch engines are using for various purposes, keyword research, getting specific resources for instance.
How does Metasearch engine work?
Metasearch engine works so readily, offers the best combination of search results from different web search engines. To simplify it, different search engines used to have different databases consist of their own indexing content.
Therefore, when you are going with a particular search engine like google and researching keywords, finding information every single day using that, you are missing contents that are indexed in other search engines.
When you are performing a search on a particular search engine, you may lack important data simply because this search engine does not give you a prominent ranking. But the Metasearch engine will keep you far away from this.
When anyone inputs a search term on those Metasearch engines, it tries to find out all the relevant content of the same keyword in different web search engines and provide results by ranking up those through its own system.
However, Metasearch engine comes with several advantages like,
- Aggregate and rate data based on social media voting from several search engines
- Mix several services for social bookmarking
- Make a very unique algorithm for mixing and classification
- Through Meta search engine, you can get more information than other conventional single search engines
- Less effort
- Much helpful when you need an overview of a separate topic
- Compile results quickly and combine them
What Metasearch engine can you use?
There are a lot of examples of Meta Search engines and they come with the variation in the working system. But no matter, you can easily use them in your explicit research to take an overview of the topic. Here are some of the best Meta Search engine you can use,
- Ixquick – it is a Dutch Meta search engine that provides search results anonymously. It processes a star system to evaluate the search results, the star system represents the prominence of the term which has been input to it. Ixquick includes some features like advanced search, powerful refinement, and limitations to European servers.
- Dogpile – shows a compilation of search results from all the major search engines
- Metager
- MetaCrawler
- Yabado
- PolyMeta
- SearchSalad
Hybrid search engines
As the name represents the search engine’s attributes, it comes as a hybrid formulation of a web search engine that is actually a combination of crawler and human directory based search engine.
The hybrid search engine program was developed to help to find all sorts of information usually stored on a separate network to use. The search engine works by using three or more separate bodies of a particular search query and goes through an algorithmic process.
However, these types of search engines provide a choice to its users to confirm whether they want to get the crawler based or the human directory based search results. But if you don’t have any particular choice and you want to get mixed up results, then it will provide what you want.
For general purposes, the human directory search results are listed first on the result page.
Read More:
HOW DOES GOOGLE RANK ITS SEARCH RESULTS
DIFFERENT TYPES OF SEARCH QUERIES AND KEYWORDS
TOP DOMINATING SEARCH ENGINES IN THE MARKET SHARE
Finally, these four types of search engines discussed above surely put some new into your general knowledge store. Among those four types, crawler based search engines are the most popular and used highly all over the world.
Google is a crawler based search engine and it has become the ruling search engine owning the whole online search to itself. Other types of search engine are also good like human directory based search engine, it ensures relevancy and satisfaction through its results and it also prioritizes user’s security.
Metasearch engines will help you a lot to find all the aspects of a decent topic to end up your thirst. It simply combines search results from different platforms.
You can have an experience through all these different types of search engines to at least having experience with them.