Types of Search Engines
There are many types of search engines that we see today. There were a lot in past which do not exist now. They either merged or disappeared completely. In this article we will discuss different types and categories of search engines.
Categories
There are a lot of categories of search. Some search engines are general like Google which show result of all queries. Others are different and are for specific purposes. For example YouTube gives only video results. For images we search in Google images and for document search se use document search engines. There are also search engines related to searching jobs, answers to question, businesses and people etc. In short some engines are general purpose while some are for specific purpose.
Types of Search Engines
Google is the most widely used general purpose search engine. It is so famous that if you want to search which search engine is the best, you will most probably put this query in Google. Today there are 100 billion search made each month each month. And this number will probably increase in future. But this does not mean that Google is the only search engine and there is no other search engine in use.
YouTube
Many people don’t include YouTube in the list of search engines but it is second after Google in terms of use. Yes, it is search engine for searching videos. About 80,000 videos are watched on YouTube per second.
Quora
This is a question and answer based search engine. For example you in guest of find out what is best theme for WordPress or best Plugin for SEO. You go and type your question in Quora. This is more probable that someone before you has asked the same question and is answered by Quora community. So you will get answer to your question. If your question is not asked by someone before, you will be answered by Quora. Based on this question and answer, Quora has become a big search engine for questions.
Bing
This was originally MSN. Later it was acquired by Microsoft and was named Bing. It is more famous in European countries especially in USA where it has about 28 percent shares. It is in competition with Google. It claims to provide more accurate result than Google but has not got popularity so far. One reason of its use may also be because it gets installed with windows by default.
Baidu
This is a search engine used in China. Chinese don’t like to search in Google, so Baidu is at No 1 in China. It also serves billions of searches according to Wikipedia. Its Alexa ranking is 4 up to this writing.
DuckDuckGo
This search engine claims that they will now expose user privacy. Other search engines track your searches and habits and then show you relevant ads you may be interested in. DuckDuckGo does not track user’s habits and actions and focuses primarily on privacy. It claims that daily searches made on our search engine are more than thirty million.
Internet Archive
It stores the archives of websites. You can use this search engine to find out how a website looked in past. For example if you are curious about how Facebook looked in 2007, go and search in archive. You will see snaps of the site.
Yandex
This search engine gives result base on latest dates. It gives you most recent information. In other search engine like Google, you can arrive on an older post if you are searching for latest jobs. So in the case of jobs searching or news Google or other search engine may not provide you recent information. It provides services in more than 1400 countries. This engine has also introduced new methods for machine learning to ensure relevancy of information.
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This was all about types of search engines. There are also other types but we have mentioned those who are well known are in use today.
