Do you know how many websites are on the Internet? To be honest, no one really knows, but the best guess is around 1.6 BILLION, and that was in 2018. Usually that number is going up. After all, it only takes a few bucks to create a website, if you aren’t using one of the free hosts.
The number of pages indexed on the Internet are estimated to be over 5.6 BILLION as of 2020, so around 4 per site. Now some sites are only a page or two, while others are thousands, and that’s just the ones we know about. Others may never be linked to, and therefore harder to find.
In the “old” days of the Internet, you’d save your favorite sites as a bookmark, and go back to them. But given how often things change, we’ve been trained by Google and Amazon (mostly) to search for content instead of bookmarking.
Common Search Engines
The most common search engines for the English speaking world are Google, Bing, and Yahoo. However Yahoo, once the number one stop, has dropped way down on the list.
Different countries have their favorites. For example, Yandex, is popular in it’s home country of Russia, while Baidu is the most popular in China. Sometimes it is the “home field advantage” where people want to support their local companies, sometimes it is mandated, or at least encouraged, by the local country’s government.
DuckDuckGo is popular among the security minded as they don’t do as much tracking of your searches. While Quora is popular for asking questions.
But here’s a big surprise… we all know that Google in the #1 search engine, but what is #2. The answer is – YouTube! Yep, it only searches videos, but that is enough to make it the #2 search engine, also owned by Google.
How Search Engines Work – the Basics
Regardless, in most cases, you are usually presented with a box on the homepage for you to enter a some text, and the search engine will give you back a list of results to solve your question.
What could be simpler? But let me ask you this – how often do you find yourself scrolling through pages of answers, or typing in something new because you couldn’t find your result right away? Well, if you’re like a typical Internet user, you need to refine your search somewhere between 40 and 60% of the time.
So in the next few pages, we’ll look at how to search more efficiently.
Intro to Search was originally found on Access 2 Learn
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