What Are Search Engines?
With 6.6 billion people worldwide using the Internet (according to Internet World Stats) and around 156 million websites to look at, it is essential that these people can search the Internet more accurately for what they are looking for.
A search engine is an information retrieval system that searches for sites based on the words that you designate in your specific search term. Thus minimising the time required to find information you actually require.
Search engines automatically create website listings by using spiders (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that "crawl" web pages and any corresponding links to other web pages. Search engines then place this collected information into a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") so that when a search query is requested, the search engines can look through their own index of information in order to find exactly what seachers are looking for. Search engine spiders frequently return to previously crawled websites on a regular basis in order to check for updates or changes.
The Open Directory Project lists 370 search engines available for Internet users. However statistics show that there are only four main search engines. These are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (MSN) and ASK.
Below are figures produced by Hitwise for the UK search engine market which are based on a sample of 8.4 million UK internet users:
UK Search Engine Market
| Search Engines | UK Market Percentage |
| 87.30% | |
| Yahoo Search | 4.09% |
| MSN Search | 3.72% |
| ASK.com | 3.07% |
In the US search engine market, Google accounts for 68.29% of all US searches followed by Yahoo Search at 19.95%, MSN Search 5.89% and Ask.com with 4.23%.
Search engines, like Google and Yahoo, are vital for people looking to buy products and services online, so it is essential your company’s website appears in the search engine results pages for your main keywords. If you do not appear in search engine results pages for your products and services, then you are losing sales to your competitors.
That’s where White Hat Media can help? We are a search engine optimisation (SEO) specialist agency who can create an effective SEO campaign that will increase your websites ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPS) . Our SEO services include modifying on page factors (content) and off page factors (link building) for your website to help increase the amount of visitors by getting your website ranking high in the search results of a search engine.
To find out more about how search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimisation (SEO) can help your website then please contact us on +44 (0) 1273 704771 or email us.
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