1.+State+of+Search+Today

Search Engine History

Some background on the "Big Three" search engines (and some useful and less-used tools that they provide), dig into how search engines discover and rank sites, and take a look at how the big three search engines compare to one another.

**The State of Search Today**

In December 2010, more than 18.2 billion searches were performed in the U.S. alone. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project in May 2010, eighty-seven percent of Americans who are online perform searches. Search is nearly the most common activity performed online, second only to email. Most searches are distributed among what we like to call the "Big Three" search engines: Google (66.6%), Yahoo! (16%), and Bing (12%). Read "Google Still Presides as the King of Search" from TheNextWeb to learn more.

//Table courtesy of [|comscore.com] //

How Do Search Engines Work?
Most of us perform searches every day. Our schools have library resources and courses related to digital literacy and finding information on the Internet. We have learned how to choose search terms and limit results. But how much do we know about how the search engines decide what pages are relevant?

Search engines, like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, have robots that crawl the Internet looking for new content to add to their index of web pages. The web is massive. In 2008 Google's index reach 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) unique URLs. Yahoo! and Bing use the same index for their results.

Once a page is discovered many factors help determine when and in what order web pages will be displayed by a search engine. These factors vary by search engine, and often include:
 * Metadata - information about the web page that appears in the code of the page. You don't see this when you look at the page itself, but search engines "read" it.
 * Keyword(s) - a list of words that describe the content of the site
 * Page Title - Name of the page. Appears in the tab or title bar of your web browser
 * Description - Often appears beneath a link on a search results page.


 * Links - how many people link to your content
 * URL - Does the web address of your page describe the content found there? For instance, think about the meaning of continuingeducation.com vs. ce.com.

The factors listed above are a very simplified version of the information analyzed by search engines. (Top 5 Ranking Factors table courtesy of SEO MOZ .)

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) -- how to get your pages on the top of the search engine results pages -- receives a lot of attention and for good reason. "**Search is the most important way users discover websites**. Search is also one of the most important ways users find their way around individual websites," according to Jacob Neilsen, guru of web usability.

Learn more about search engines and how they rank pages from the Knight Digital Media Center at UC-Berkley. Learn much more in Google's Search Optimization Started Guide (pdf).

The graphic for this section is from the SEOmoz.org survey of industry professionals on the most important factors in.

Comparing Search Engines Results
Let's take a look at differences among the "Big Three" search engines. Enter a keyword search of your choice on Yahoo! vs. Google and compare the results. The chart below is a sample Yahoo! vs. Google chart for Ray's Online Learning Update blog. Find six more tools in this BashBosh.com blog post.

Additional Articles and Websites of Interest:

 * 1) Incompetent Research Skills Curb Users’ Problem Solving: @http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-skills.html
 * 2) Here is a book that argues that algorithms and search filters are making us less broadly informed: @http://www.amazon.com/Filter-Bubble-What-Internet-Hiding/dp/1594203008
 * 3) Review of the topic and TED talk on Mashable: @http://mashable.com/2011/03/03/eli-pariser-ted/
 * 4) LifeHacker Article: @http://lifehacker.com/5730396/over-77-percent-of-lifehacker-readers-say-googles-search-results-are-less-useful-lately - not exactly scientific, but it confirms some blogger suggestions that Google results have become more "spammy."
 * 5) New Chrome Extension (algorithims to detect “content farms” allowing users to block sites from their search results) @http://goo.gl/eccmE
 * 6) Google’s Search Blog ( @http://goo.gl/WlFoF ) and Google's Inside Search site( [] )