A Search Engine is a program that segregates and sorts content, data and information – on the internet (or a part of the internet) or across the world wide web – making it convenient for the user to find what he is looking for. And SEO experts tries to rank their website at the top position in the result page of the search engine whenever the user searches content relevant to it. As all the business these days are trying to make online presence, the digital marketing jobs opportunities are at boom right now.
There are many kinds of search engines – there are general search engines which take in data and information about all kind of content there is on the internet; there are websites that have their own search engine system to procure information within that site, in essence, Social Media Sites like Facebook, Online Shopping Sites like Amazon, Blogging Sites like Medium which have their own search bars on the top.
But the behemoth of all search engines is Google.
An estimated 87% of the users use Google as their Search Engine and the rest 13% users use other search engines.
Some of the popular ones except the leader Google are,
Bing
Microsoft’s answer Google in search, but could not prove to be a reliable alternative.
Yahoo
Yahoo used to be the leader in email providing and web search service provider until Google eclipsed it.
Baidu
Founded in 2000, is the most popular search engine in China Baidu is accessible worldwide, but its major drawback is that it is available only in the Chinese language.
Yandex
Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia with close to 65% market share, according to Wikipedia.
DuckDuckGo
Duck Duck Go has a clean interface, it does not track users and it is not fully loaded with ads, yet its market share is constantly below 0.5%.
The major drawback of DuckDuckGo is that it does not have a proper and cogent ranking algorithm like that of Google.
Ask
It has less than 0.5 % of the overall queries. The search results reverted by Ask is not as good as even Bing, so it suffers on that front.
Aol
With a market share close to 0.05%, it provides access to a host of popular websites. In 2015 it was acquired by Verizon Communications.
Working of a search engine
The general working of a search engine if to be explained in a gist, would be as,
- The search engine runs a program – a bot – called spider that “crawls” through the internet websites – collecting all kinds of data on the world wide web (WWW).
- After collecting the data, indexing is done and it is stored in a database.
- Now once new data has been stored, that data can be retrieved by searching it using the search engine.
Understanding search engines is extremely vital in getting visitors to a website – there are certain things engines look for in websites to rank them better.
For instance, if you search for “shirts”. The results will show numerous websites. The website that is displayed up as among the first results are the ones that are popular with the keyword “shirts”. This is because that website has optimized its site according to SEO guidelines and has made alterations necessary as compared to other websites and provides the relevant and valuable content for which you are searching. The quality of your content plays a vital role in it.
Other websites too may have done search engine optimizations – but the results will be according to how better the keyword is associated with the website.
Today having an online presence for businesses is imperative. Innumerable businesses have found that investing in an online presence has aided business growth tremendously. Specially the IT sector is growing tremendously giving rise the IT Job opportunities.
How is Rankings of pages ascertained?
Each search engine employs algorithm which decides how to rank millions and billions of web pages within its index. A good understanding of this algorithm gives you the ability to optimize your page in accordance to the guidelines so that the search engine ranks your web page higher than the others for the same search query put in by a user.
For example, Google, gives a lot of importance to backlinks. Backlinks are link that other websites have directed to your website.
The more backlinks you have from external websites that are popular, the higher you will rank. Because, according to Google, if a lot of good quality, popular sites or blogs with quality content writing which are recommending the website, then it must be worth visiting.
However, it is imperative to get backlinks from sites that have good authority. Getting backlinks from a host of sites that do not have good authority is of no use. Google would not rank your website higher getting recommendations from sites that are of no decent authority.
Other Search Engines
Other search engines work with the same principle of indexing webpages within their database. However, the way every search engine chooses to rank the webpages in their database is not the same.
Google considers backlinks from other websites to be valuable but other search engines may consider different things to rank websites. So, the trick is to find out how the search engine values and get your page optimized according to it.
Every website such as Flipkart, Amazon and Quora has a search engine within the site. There is a search engine in Flipkart and Amazon that shows products in the database according to the keywords typed. The products are ranked according to some rules.
So, you see, the principles do not change. The key is to study the search engine and optimize the contents and dynamics of your site accordingly.
Why should I know how any search engine works?
Having the knowledge of the working of a search engine is important to have, especially for people who aim to work as a digital marketing specialist or a web developer in the future. Companies in any and every domain know how important it is to not only have online presence but make your presence felt online. They need web developers to build websites for them and digital marketers to do this job for them. Hence you must have seen number of job vacancy listed on many job portal websites.
Demand for web developers is going to shoot up despite the imminent market slowdown we are to face and more than 65 percent of the companies are keen to hire more digital marketers for their business to make a more emphatic mark on the web.
Companies now are reconciling the disparity between online and offline presence in more effective way. In response to this, digital marketing companies have begun to, integrate and online and offline strategies.
Author Bio:
Sharad Khatri is a Digital Marketing Intern for Job Vacancy Result, we are a research based, cutting-edge HR Tech Platform based in Delhi, who strives to establish a healthy ecosystem that bridges the gap between job seekers and job recruiters.