SEO Vs World Wide Web

And hence ‘Search Engines’ were developed. Search engines became so popular that now more than 80% of the web-site visitors come from the search engines. But what exactly is a Search Engine? According to webopedia, “Search Engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found”.

For Example, if you want to know about the Automobile market in India, you will type some keywords like automotive market, automobiles in India, automobile manufacturers in India etc. and once you click on search button, you’ll get the best relevant data related to those keywords.

Search engine industry is dominated by 3 major players- Google, Yahoo! and MSN with a market share of 35%, 32% and 16% respectively (According to searchenginewatch.com survey, 2004). A report released in March 2005 indicated that the search engines are being used between 2 to 3.5 billion times per day to find information online. And of course people using search engines are on the hunt for specific information and hence the audience is highly targeted.

There are many other search engines such as AskJeeves, AOL, and Excite etc which are also famous among net users. But what is attractive is the stats regarding usage of search engines. The use of search engine is a top online activity and netizens increasingly feel they get the information they want when they execute search queries.

On the probable eve of Google’s initial public offering, new surveys and traffic data confirm that search engines have become an essential and popular way for people to find information online. A nationwide phone survey of 1,399 Internet users between May 14 and June 17 by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows:

• 84% of internet users have used search engines. On any given day online, more than half those using the Internet use search engines. And more than two-thirds of Internet users say they use search engines at least a couple of times per week.

• The use of search engines usually ranks only second to email use as the most popular activity online. During periods when major news stories are breaking, the act of getting news online usually surpass the use of search engines.

• There is a substantial payoff as search engines improve and people become more adept at using them. Some 87% of search engine users say they find the information they want most of the time when they use search engines.

Four times voted as Most Outstanding Search Engine, Google is an undisputed market leader of search engine industry. Google is a crawler based search engine, which is known for providing both comprehensive coverage of web page and most relevant information. It attracts the largest number searches and the number goes upto 250 million searches everyday.

Yahoo! is the second largest player in the industry with 32% of market share. Yahoo! started as a human based directory but turned into Crawler based search engine in 2002. Till early 2004, it was powered by Google but after that they started to use their own technology.

Overture stands next to Google in terms of number of searches per day. It is owned by yahoo and attracts more than 167 million searches per day. Overture was the first search engine who came up with PPC program. AskJeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the "natural language" search engine that let you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything. When launched, it was run by around 100 editors who monitored search logs. Today, however, AskJeeves depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users