What is a Search Engine?

Aadi lives in a BIG house. With 20 rooms.

One day, Aadi lost his book. The one he was currently reading. Since Aadi is a very young child, he requested his kaka (uncle) to please help him search for the book.

Kaka asked Aadi to sit in a room and wait for him. Then, kaka went from room to room, looking for the book. Finally, he found the book and brought it to Aadi.

What did kaka do for Aadi? He searched for something that Aadi wanted and brought it to him.

Next day, Aadi decided to look for some information on the internet. He sat on his computer and opened a special program. This program, like Aadi’s kaka, asked Aadi to sit in his chair, and searched all the pages on the internet for him. Then, the program showed Aadi all the pages that have the information that he needs.

What did the program do for Aadi?

It searched the internet for the information that Aadi wanted and brought it to him.

A program that does that is called a Search Engine.

Is Google the only or the first Search Engine?

No to both. In 2021, and for many years now, Google is the market leader. It means that Google is used to search the internet more than any other search engine.

In 2021, Google had 92% of the search engine traffic. This means that if 100 searches were made on the internet, 92 of them were made using Google.

But there are many other search engines – Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, etc. Russia has Yandex, which is the main search engine there. China has Baidu, which is the main search engine there.

The First Search Engine

The credit for the first search engine goes to a search engine named Archie, created by Alan Emtage, a student at the McGill University in Montreal.

For a long time, Yahoo was the market leader, and Askjeeves.com was a very popular choice too. There were other search engines as well.

Google was only incorporated in 1998.