Introduction on Search Engines and Their Mission

Search has become an everyday act in the need for more information, knowledge and business. According to "comScore", 12 billion searches are being performed each month (as of January 2009) According to that, 400 million searches are performed each day, which is 4,500 web searches per second.

Google with it's 65% of the search market share handles more than 2,900 searches per second and the response is delivered in less than one second. Which is quite impressive.
However you see at it, it's way better than going into a library and spending few hours in finding what you need.

Knowing only this information you can imagine what means to rank well in the search engines. If your business relies on services or products, then you better ask yourself what are the factors that will rank your business website on the first page of the main search engines.
Obtaining such prime search results is not a simple matter. And it takes knowledge, personal effort and spending long hours on link building (or paying for professional SEO services).

The way search engines earn their money is through paid advertising. The most used service in paid search is the pay-per-click (or cost-per-click) model. Which tells us that the advertisers pay for each person who will click on the link of their website placed in the paid results after a search has been performed.

Now, what do you think? Is it easy for the search engines to deliver the exact search result for the query that you searched for? - No! It's not.

Search engines invest a tremendous amount of time, energy and capital in improving their relevance. This includes studies on user behavior, users responses to their search results, comparing their results with the results from other search engines, eye tracking studies and lot more.

Because search engines' success depends on the relevance of their search results, manipulation of search results is something that can destroy them, and that is known as spam. Each search engine employs a team of people who are working on spam detection and eliminating the same. This is important because everyone who is doing SEO should know that wrong (aka black hat) tactics can be the worst thing for his website, business or whatsoever he has on the internet. We will discuss more on this in further posts.

Figure 1-1 shows us the U.S. market share for search engines in January 2009, according to "comScore". As you can see, Google is the most dominant search engine on the Web in the U.S.

In European countries the domination is even greater, but, that is not the same for China, where the search engine Baidu is the leading search engine.

I will end this post with a definition on search engines taken from wikipedia:

" A web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list of results and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input. "