There are over 100 search engines that can be used to search for information while one is using the internet. However, not all the web search engines are equally popular. Some of the world’s popular search engines include Google, Yahoo!, MSN, and Ask.com. The essay compares and contrasts Google and Yahoo! search engines. Although Yahoo! is also a useful tool for searching information on the web, Google remains the world’s leading search engine.
At the dawn of the twenty first century (2000), Google search engine became popular among internet users. It was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin starting 1996 and is owned by Google Inc. In December 2008, the popularity of Google in the world was at 82.7% and 78.4% a year later.
Its market share in the U.S in July 2009 stood at 63.2%. The company came up with great innovations to better its ability to meet client’s demand and ease of accessing information. PageRank which was designed to operate algorithmically provided better results when searching for information.
The web pages are numbered and linked with other related pages using the PageRank. This linkage ensures that one can get alternative results and hence providing additional information. Google became popular owing to the fact that it reduced the interface to the search engine hence making its usage easier and uninterrupted.
Google, just like most search engines, works by retrieving and storing massive information of several web pages. The retrieval is accomplished using an automated browser known as a web crawler or spider. All links on any given site are tracked and retrieved. Once retrieved, the contents of the site are checked in order to get a proper way of indexing in the search engine.
The indexed data are stored in a database which is then searchable using a query. The process of indexing enables quick access of information, even by typing a single word. Search results are highly biased towards resources which are informational. It is highly ineffective for cheesy off topic links. Google search engine, for instance, stores all or a section of the web page and provides additional details about the source page.
Yahoo!’s search service provision has been in existence for a significantly long time. David F. and Jerry Yang are the founders of Yahoo! (1994). It used to provide search services for web pages using its own web directories as well as outsourcing to other providers.
It did not display the full-text of a given web page. In 2000, Yahoo! used Inktomi’s search engine to provide search services which it later acquired two years later. In 2004, Yahoo! shifted to Google and used it to provide search services. Yahoo!, after borrowing technologies from the various acquisitions and partnering installed its own search engine.
In July 2009, a deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft was reached where the Microsoft’s search engine technology (Bing) would power Yahoo!’s. The performance of Yahoo! search engine over the last decade has been on the decline both in terms of popularity and market share. In July 2009, it had a market share of 7.16%.
Currently, Yahoo! search engine has numerous internal materials and is highly commercialized. Other companies pay in order to be included in the Yahoo! search. In this case, a person who wishes to use it would first have to pass an interface of commercial advertisements.
This has impacted negatively on the popularity of Yahoo! due to some element of bias during the search process. The greatest challenge in Yahoo! search is the determination of the nature of a given link, whether it is a natural or artificial citation. For Yahoo! search engine, it is quite effective when it comes to cheesy off topic reciprocal links.
The two search engines described above have significant similarities and differences. They are similar in that they provide similar services, work using relatively similar technologies and retrieval patterns. However, Google and Yahoo! search engines have peculiar origins, popularity, market share, and preferences.
Search engines offer great opportunities for people using the internet since they are able to get rich information easily.
The users rate these service providers on the quality and ease of retrieving information. Owing to the inherent biases by the various search engines, Yahoo! has lost its popularity since it is highly commercialized and is unable to accurately determine the authenticity of the content.