There is an impossibly huge amount of the data on the web. The number of the sites has increased so much so that the world is running out of IP addresses. It is impossible for anyone to know even a quarter of the websites, let alone all of them. Even while we surf the net we not only want to have a look at the specific site that we know of, but other related sites too. Rather most of the time we don’t even know any specific internet site for the purpose we surf the web. It is the search engines that help us in our searches- whether specific or random.

The internet is an ocean of knowledge that is spread all across the world over different web servers. Search Engines thus help us to locate the correct information based on our requirements or queries. A search engine provides you with the links to the various websites that may match with your queries and requirements. A thorough knowledge of the basic functioning of a search engine is essential if you want to understand the terminology and techniques to work to get your website page a higher rank in search engine results.

There are various search engines that are popularly used all across the globe. Though some are widely preferred over the others, all of them have almost similar functioning with minor differences. The most popular search engines that are used all over the world are:

• Google
• Yahoo
• Bing
• AOL
• Ask

Though Google reigns the search engines, the others too are used invariably. The reason that Google has dominated the search engine market for so long is the quality of its services. Google is easy to use and gives the most reliable and relevant results. Also Google has access to maximum amount of information.

The three main functions through which a search engine operates are:

• Web crawling
• Indexing
• Searching

The search engines stores the information about the various web pages, which they retrieve from the HTML itself. The search engine retrieves the pages through a Web Crawler. This is also called a spider. It is an automated web browser that follows the various links on every site. It may exclude some of them by the use of robots.txt. Each page is then analyzed according to the content that is put up on the page. Then it determines as to how it should be indexed (for example, words are extracted from the titles, headings, or special fields called meta tags).

The data that is collected this way is then stored in an index database which can be used later on according to the queries. A query can be as short as a single word. Thus the indexing of the information allows the information to be found as quickly as possible.

The user surfs the web through entering certain ‘keywords’ to conduct the search. The results are shown according to the keywords. The search engine examines the indexes and then provides with a list of the links to the best matching web pages according to the query that is entered. It presents a list along with a short summary of the main components of the website. This way the user can browse through the list and choose the web pages that he thinks would be most relevant to his search.

As a rule and international decorum the search engines are programmed to rank the websites solely on their popularity, appropriateness and relevancy. But there have been studies that show that at times some political, economic and social influences may vary the information provided by the search engines. This bias may arise directly from the economic or commercial processes or political processes. Google Bombing is one example of an attempt to manipulate search results for political, social or commercial reasons.

All the search engines that are there or that have been are: W3Catalog, Aliweb, JumpStation, WebCrawler, Go.com, Lycos, AltaVista, Daum, Open Text Web Index, Magellan, Excite, SAPO, Yahoo!, Dogpile, Inktomi, HotBot, Ask Jeeves, Northern Light, Yandex, Google, MSN Search (Active as Bing), AlltheWeb, GenieKnows, Naver, Teoma, Vivisimo, Baidu, Exalead, Inktomi (Acquired by Yahoo!), Info.com, Yahoo! Search, A9.com, (Closed), Sogou, AOL Search, Ask.com, GoodSearch, SearchMe, wikiseek (Closed), Quaero, Ask.com, Live Search, ChaCha, Guruji.com, Sproose (Closed), Wikia Search (Closed), Blackle.com, Powerset (Acquired by Microsoft), Picollator (Closed), Viewzi (Closed), Boogami, LeapFish, Forestle, VADLO, Duck Duck Go, Bing, Yebol, Mugurdy (Closed due to a lack of funding), Goby, Yandex, Cuil (Closed), Blekko, Yummly, Exalead (Acquired by Dassault Systèmes), Interred, and Ipiari.