A Search Engine is a programme that is used to search and identify items which are stored in a database which are linked to keywords or characters that are specified by the users and used specially for finding the particular files in the World Wide Web (www). So basically, search engine act as a medium of getting the ocean of Knowledge. Some most popular search engines are GOOGLE, YAHOO, BING etc. The use of internet has been increased rapidly in this youth generation and people are investing most of the time for gathering information from the www via a search engine. There are two types of people who use search engine. First users are those who search in a search engine to get information. Users do billion of searches in order to get information. Another users are those who try to optimize their websites for getting the top rank in the search result and optimizing an website for Google or other search engine is a very necessary part of getting a large number of audience and the visitors will help to generate revenue for site owners either for the advertisement that is displayed on the website or by purchasing any product from the website.
There are four types of search engines based on how it works
- CRAWL BASED SEARCH ENGINES
- HUMAN POWERED DIRECTORIES
- HYBRID SEARH ENGINES
- OTHER SPECIAL SEARCH ENGINES
CRAWL BASED SEARCH ENGINES: These types of search engines occupy crawler or bot or spider for crawling and indexing new content to search database. Example of these types of crawl-based search engines are Google, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, Yandex etc.
HUMAN POWERED DIRECTORIES: These types of search engines are also called as open directory system which is depend on human based activities for listing. First, site owner submits a short description of the site along with the category is to be listed. Then, submitted site is checked manually and after that it is added in the exact category for listing. Keywords that entered in a search box, will be matched with the description of the sites. A good site with good content is always greatly accepted and reviewed rather than a site with having poor content.
HYBRID SEARCH ENGINES: Hybrid search engines are the mixture of both the crawler based and manual indexing for listing the sites in search results. Generally, maximum crawler-based search engines such as Google uses crawler as primary mechanism and human directories as the secondary medium. But still there are some manual filtering of search results that occurs to remove copied and spammy sites. Whenever an website is identified for spammy activities the website owner must have to take the necessary actions to remove the spammy activities and he has to resubmit the site to the search engines.
OTHER SPECIAL SEARCH ENGINES: Besides all the three above search engines there is other some types of search engines and they are depending upon the usage. Search engines have different types of bots for exclusively displaying images, videos, news, products and local listings. For example, Google News page can be used to search news from different types of newspaper. Some search engines like Dogpile, are made in order to collect meta data of the pages. Some search engines like Swoogle helps us to provide exact search results on specific area.
In order to enhance user experience, all search engines need to be optimised. Search engine optimisation is the process of improving the sites to increase its visibility for relevant searches. The more visibility the pages have the more it likely to be catch the attention of the customer. SEO is the basic part of a Digital Marketing because people do billions of searches with commercial intent to find out several information about the product or for the services. Hence, search has become the primary source to bring the digital traffic for brands. That is why greater the visibility of the pages the higher it will be ranked in the search result.
However, Search Engine Optimisation has also some drawbacks as SEO is not an appropriate strategy for website. Search Engine Marketing (SEM) is the process of designing and optimising search engine ad-campaign and the difference between SEO and SEM is the paid and unpaid features for getting the rank in search result. A successful internet marketing depends upon the building of a high-quality web page and flatter the user.
Search Engine Optimisation may generate a sufficient return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for search and there is no guarantee of continued referrals. On behalf of the application, SEO can be classified into two groups. First one is called the “WHITE HAT”, this one is recommended by the companies as a part of a good design and another one is called the “BLACK HAT”, and these types of techniques are not recommended by the companies and they do not approve that. White hat allows to produce results that will be last long, on the other hand black hat predicts that their sites may be temporarily or permanently once the search engine notices that what they are doing.
A SEO technique will be only considered as white hat if it comes under the search engine guidelines and shows no duplicity or fraud alerts. But white hat is not just about following the guidelines but to ensure the content of a search engine and then ranks in the same content which the use will notice. White hat basically precises content for the user and not for the search engine and after that it makes the content easily accessible to the online ‘spider’ algorithm.
Black hat SEO techniques offers to improve rankings in a way which are disapproved by the search engines. A black hat technique uses the hidden text as text colour similar to the background in an invisible ‘div’ and then positioned off screen. Search engine may penalize the sites that are using black hat, either by reducing their rankings or throwing out their listing from the database.