About search engines

About Search Engines

 Birth

 History

http://seosemandsocialnetworking.blogspot.com/
 Services

 Statistics

By

1 G.Chandrashekar Reddy
Sr. SEO In Truss Techno Softs

Seosem.hyderabad@gmail.com

Contents

1. Search Engines 4

2. A Brief Overview of the Early Web 5

3. The Birth of Search Engines as We Know Them 7

4. Google Is Launched by Sergey Brin and Larry Page 8

5. The Missing Link: Making Money from Search 9

6. Search in 2003 and Beyond 10

7. Microsoft Starts Taking Search Seriously 12

8. The Anatomy of a Search Results Page 13

9. How Search Works 18

2

11. History of Bing Search Engine 21

12. Yahoo! Search 50

13. Google Search 75

15. Search Engines Market Share 129

3

Search Engines

On the Internet, a search engine is a coordinated set of programs that
includes:

 A spider (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that goes to every page or
representative pages on every Web site that wants to be searchable and
reads it, using hypertext links on each page to discover and read a
site's other pages.

 A program that creates a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog")
from the pages that have been read.

 A program that receives your search request, compares it to the
entries in the index, and returns results to you .

 An alternative to using a search engine is to explore a structured
directory of topics. Yahoo, which also lets you use its search engine, is
the most widely-used directory on the Web. A number of Web portal
sites offer both the search engine and directory approaches to finding
information. 4

A Brief Overview of the Early Web

Search engines are such an integral part of everyday life that it’s hard to
remember a time before they were so essential. But it hasn’t always been that

way: in the past, search engine results were often filled with irrelevant content,
spam, and other kinds of malicious material. Results were also influenced heavily
by marketers with big budgets.

Before you begin your journey to becoming a search engine optimization expert, it’s
a good idea to take a look back at some of the key developments in the industry
and understand how they helped shape the wayin which search engines work
today.

After Tim Berners-Lee invented what we know today as the World Wide Web
using hypertext markup language (or HTML) in 1991, the very first online robot—
the World Wide Web Wanderer—was launched in June 1993. Its initial task was to
measure the growth of the Internet, where it actively counted the number
of servers connected to the Web. The role of this first robot was quickly expanded
to capture actual URLs, and the database it constructed was known as Wandex.

5

The very first service resembling what would today be called a search
engine—named the Repository-Based Software Engineering (RBSE) spider—
was launched in late 1993. This was the first site that allowed users to search
by relevance for content it had indexed while crawling the Internet.

Then, in 1994, a name that’s likely to be more familiar to you entered the
landscape, when David Filo and Jerry Yang created the Yahoo Directory. In
the beginning, Yahoo was just a collection of Jerry and David’s favorite links;
as the list grew, they added functionality that allowed users to search the
database of sites.

6

The Birth of Search Engines as We Know Them

In early 1994, the first real search engine—which included a spider that crawled
entire websites and indexed them according to relevance—was born. This step

forward in search and indexing technology preempted the launch of many
innovative search engines that year. Among the newcomers were Lycos, Infoseek,
and AltaVista.

The mid to late ‘90s saw a rapid expansion of the Web, with millions and millions
of pages of content being created and indexed by search engines. By late 1996,
Lycos had already indexed some 60 million pages of content.

The rapid growth of online content led to the emergence of a much greater problem
with all search engines: the relevance of the results returned for keyword searches.
A simple search algorithm would work sufficiently
well with a database of 10,000 documents, but trying to return the most relevant
site out of an index of 100 million documents was another story altogether.

7

Google Is Launched by Sergey Brin and Larry Page

In early 1996, two PhD students at Stanford University began collaborating on a
search engine they called BackRub. The difference between their project and other

search engines of the day was that BackRub used a unique technique: analyzing the
backlinks pointing to a website to determine its relevance for a particular search
query.

Citation notation—common in academia—was the underlying concept behind
BackRub’s ranking engine. If one source is cited frequently by other documents, it
usually means that it’s more important and relevant. On the Internet, a backlink is,
in effect, a citation.

During 1998, these two enterprising engineering students launched Google. This new
search engine was built around a technology they dubbed PageRank, which was
based on BackRub’s ranking engine.

By the year 2000, Google was powering the searches for AOL, Yahoo, and various
other major online providers. The company had raised over $25 million in funding,
and had come to essentially dominate the search engine landscape.

8

The Missing Link: Making Money from Search

During 2000, Google launched what would grow to power its phenomenal
growth and allow it to expand to markets as broad as books, video, news, and

maps. AdWords, as it was called, was a service that sold ads on a cost-per-
thousand (CPM) basis; by 2002 it had evolved into the current model, which
places ads using a cost-per-click (CPC) auction system.

AOL chose Google to provide its paid search functionality, which it ran
alongside relevant search results, in early 2002. This marked a turning point in
Google’s history: until then, the company had been growing quickly, but had yet
to tackle the paid search market, which had up to that point been dominated by
a company called Overture.

9

Search in 2003 and Beyond

Since 2003, all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, Overture, and
Microsoft’s Live Search (now Bing), have maintained the same underlying

business model: indexing web page content, and serving ads alongside search
results.

Major search engines all employ the same basic page layout, with search
refinement options on the left, site listings in the middle, and paid ads across
the top and right-hand side of the page.

The difference between the major search engines that existed in 2003 and those
we have in 2010 is the underlying algorithms that are used to index and rank
content according to relevance. Google’s superior technology and matching
techniques are the major reasons why it has captured the most significant
share of the worldwide search market.

Search engine algorithms rely on scale, and on machine learning to adapt to
market changes and understand various nuances within specific niches. For
example, a good search algorithm will attempt to understand the meaning of a
phrase and its context, rather than just search for the frequency of a given
keyword.
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Moreover, the more people search for a given phrase, the more visitor interactions
can be recorded by the search engine. The engine can then learn which kinds of
results are more relevant for particular phrases and categories. This has meant
that as Google grew faster than other search engines, the amount of relevant data

it captured across a multitude of different niches and categories allowed its
engineers to deliver even more relevant and meaningful results.

The search wars of today are waged over relevance; paid search results are simply
the ammunition that fuels massive research and development budgets at search
companies. Google continues to dominate the search industry: in the 2009 financial
year, Google’s revenue was just under US$24 billion, with over US$8 billion in
profit.

11

Microsoft Starts Taking Search Seriously

Microsoft was famously late to the search party, given that it had total market
domination of desktop computers connected to the Internet. Microsoft’s first foray
into online search was made through the MSN portal, which launched in 1998;

however, it was only in early 2005 that MSN stopped using external providers
such as Yahoo to power its search engine, and brought search technology in-house.

In late 2006, Microsoft launched its Live Search (Live.com), which was its first
serious attempt at becoming a player in the search space. This service never gained
the traction Microsoft had hoped for, constantly lagging behind both Google and
Yahoo in relevance and market share.

With falling market share and inferior search technology, Microsoft made one of the
biggest plays in the history of the Web—an attempt to purchase Yahoo outright for
over US$44 billion. Although the bid was ultimately unsuccessful, it was the
turning point that signaled both Yahoo’s decline and Microsoft’s resurgence as an
online player.

On May 28, 2009, Microsoft launched Bing, the replacement for the Live.com
search engine, which has received praise for innovations and for its content-type-
specific results pages. At the time of writing, Bing has roughly 12.1% share of the
US search market, which remains lower than Yahoo’s 18.3% and Google’s 63.7%
shares. While there are certainly other search engines, these are—at least for 12
now—the three main ones you need to concern yourself with.

The Anatomy of a Search Results Page

You now know the backstories of Google, Yahoo, and some of the other major
online forces involved in search. So, let’s take a closer look at the core component

of a search engine, and our ultimate goal as SEO professionals: the search engine
results page (or SERP).

All of the major search engines follow the same basic layout and usability
principles, and this is no accident.

The SERP is made up of the following elements:

Search box

All three major search engines place the search box front and center on the page,
giving users the ability to conduct more searches.

Search refinements

The left-hand side of each SERP features more advanced segmentation of the
search results you’re viewing. You can sort by media type (images, video, and so
on), country, website, date, and other refinements.
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Organic results

Located below the search box are the natural search results or organic search
results—those results that have been ranked purely on the basis of the search
engine’s algorithms, that is, on their relevance. These results are sorted on the

basis of each search engine’s specific algorithms, and the goal of your SEO
campaign should be to appear in the first position within this section.

Paid results

Sitting to the right-hand side of the organic results, and sometimes above them,
are the paid search results, or PPC (pay per click) ads. The paid search
results are bid on in an auction system, and the position of each ad is
determined by a combination of relevance, the amount the advertiser bid, and
the ad copy used.

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Viewing the SERPs of Google, Yahoo, and Bing

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16

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How Search Works
Search engines are constantly indexing content, and recording which site links to
which other site, the content that appears on each page, the tags and keywords
associated with certain topics, and a number of other elements. In all, there are

hundreds of different signals search engines use to determine relevance—a word
that’s used to indicate how, well, relevant a given page is to a given query.

The search engine indexing process starts with the search spider. When we refer
to a search engine spider or bot (short for robot), we’re talking about one or more
dedicated computers that have been programmed to crawl the Web and collect all
the information they can find, and store how all that information is related to
various search terms.

Modern search engine spiders have two distinct tasks:

Crawling is the traveling from site to site, and page to page, discovering content
and links.

Indexing is the task of building a database (or an index) of keywords and phrases,
the sites and pages that are relevant to them, and the links between those sites.

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Once the search engine spider has scoured pages, various bits of information are
stored in the search engine’s index. Some of those important pieces of information
include:
 The content and structure of each page

 A record of all other pages—both internal and external to the site—that are
linked to from the page
 A record of all the pages that link to the page
 Key HTML tags such as the page title, headings, and images

This is a very basic list of the types of data that search engines index. There are
obviously some very smart ways in which they identify relationships between
pieces of information and index websites, but for the purposes of this chapter, those
pieces of information are all you need to concern yourself with.

Once this information has been collected and stored in a database, the search
engine’s proprietary algorithms take over; each engine uses its own special
calculations to determine how relevant your website’s content is to a particular
search term. These algorithms are the difference between a search engine that any
programmer could write in a week, and the dominant search engines today.

The major factors that search engines use to determine a page’s relevance for a
particular search query are much the same now as they were in the days when
Google first launched its PageRank technology; however, they’ve become more19
sophisticated and complex over time through the ongoing battle for more relevant
search results.

Two key factors are:

 The number and authority of related websites that link to the page

 The relevance of the content on the page to the query

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History of Bing Search Engine

URL http://www.bing.com
Slogan Bing and decide
Commercial Yes
Type of site Search engine
Registration Optional
Available languages Multilingual (40)
Owner Microsoft
Created by Microsoft
Lunched June 1, 2009
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Alexa rank 23
Current status Active

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is the
current web search engine (advertised as a "decision engine") from Microsoft.
Bing was unveiled by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on May 28, 2009 at the All
Things Digital conference in San Diego. It went fully online on June 3, 2009, with

a preview version released on June 1, 2009.

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Notable changes include the listing of search suggestions as queries are entered
and a list of related searches (called "Explorer pane") based on semantic
technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008. As of January
2010, Bing is the third largest search engine on the web by query volume, at

3.16%, after its competitor Google at 85.35% and Yahoo at 6.15%, according to
Net Applications.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would
power Yahoo! Search.

History:
MSN SEARCH:
MSN Search was a search engine by Microsoft that comprised a search engine,
index, and web crawler. MSN Search first launched in the third quarter of 1998
and used search results from Inktomi.

In early 1999, MSN Search launched a version which displayed listings from
Looksmart blended with results from Inktomi except for a short time in 1999
when results from AltaVista were used instead. Since then Microsoft upgraded
MSN Search to provide its own self-built search engine results, the index of
which was updated weekly and sometimes daily. The upgrade started as a beta
program in November 2004, and came out of beta in February 2005. Image
search was powered by a third party, Picsearch. The service also started 23
providing its search results to other search engine portals in an effort to better
compete in the market.

WINDOWS LIVE SEARCH :

The first public beta of Windows Live Search was unveiled on March 8, 2006, with
the final release on September 11, 2006 replacing MSN Search. The new search
engine used search tabs that include Web, news, images, music, desktop, local, and
Microsoft Encarta. In the roll-over from MSN Search to Windows Live Search,
Microsoft stopped using Picsearch as their image search provider and started
performing their own image search, fueled by their own internal image search
algorithms.

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LIVE SEARCH :

On March 21, 2007, Microsoft announced that it would separate its search
developments from the Windows Live services family, rebranding the service as
Live Search. Live Search was integrated into the Live Search
and Ad Platform headed by Satya Nadella, part of Microsoft's Platform and
Systems division. As part of this change, Live Search was merged with
Microsoft adCenter.

25

A series of reorganizations and consolidations of Microsoft's search offerings were
made under the Live Search branding. On May 23, 2008, Microsoft announced the
discontinuation of Live Search Books and Live Search Academic and integrated all
academic and book search results into regular search, and as a result this also
included the closure of Live Search Books Publisher Program. Soon after, Windows
Live Expo was discontinued on July 31, 2008. Live Search Macros, a service for
users to create their own custom search engines or use macros created by other
users, was also discontinued shortly after. On May 15, 2009, Live Product Upload, a
service which allowed merchants to upload products information onto Live Search
Products, was discontinued. The final reorganization came as Live Search QnA was
rebranded as MSN QnA on February 18, 2009, however, it was subsequently
discontinued on May 21, 2009.

Microsoft recognized that there would be a brand issue as long as the word "Live"
remained in the name. As an effort to create a new identity for Microsoft's search26
services, Live Search was officially replaced by Bing on June 3, 2009.

Yahoo! search deal :

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced that they had made a 10-
year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo!
will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the

first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft
sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will
eventually feature "Powered by Bing" branding.

Market Share :

Before the launch of Bing the market share of Microsoft web search pages (MSN
and Live search) had been steadily declining. Since Bing's launch in the US,
Microsoft has increased its US search market share. Microsoft, in third-place,
has increased its share from 8 percent in May to 11.5 percent in February 2010,
according to figures from ComScore.

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Features :
INTERFACE FEATURES :

 Daily changing of background image. The images are mostly of noteworthy

places in the world, though it sometimes displays animals, people, and sports. The
background image also contains information about the element(s) shown in the
image.

 Left side navigation pane. Includes navigation and, on results pages, related
searches and prior searches.

 Right side extended preview which shows a bigger view of the page and gives
URLs to links inside of the page.

 Sublinks. On certain search results, the search result page also shows section
links within the article (this is also done on other search engines, including
Google).

 Enhanced view where third party site information can be viewed inside Bing.

 On certain sites, search from within the website on the results page.

 On certain sites, Bing will display the Customer Service number on the results 28
page.

MEDIA FEATURES :

 Video thumbnail Preview where, by hovering over a video thumbnail, the video
automatically starts playing.

 Image search with continuous scrolling images results page that has adjustable
settings for size, layout, color, style and people.

 Video search with adjustable setting for length, screen size, resolution and
source.

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INSTANT ANSWERS :

 Sports. Bing can directly display scores from a specific day, recent scores from a
league or scores and statistics on teams or players.

 Finance. When entering a company name or stock symbol and either stock or
quote in the search box Bing will show direct stock information like a stock chart,
price, volume, and p/e ratio in a webslice that users can
subscribe to.

 Math calculations (e.g., 2 * pi * 24).[20] Users can enter math expressions in the
search box using a variety of math operators and (trig) functions and Bing will
provide a direct calculation of the expression.

 Package tracking and tracing. When a user types the name of the shipping
company and the tracking number Bing will provide direct tracking information.

 Dictionary. When 'define', 'definition' or 'what is' followed by a word is entered in
the searchbox Bing will show a direct answer from the Encarta dictionary.

 Spell check. Will change frequently misspelled search terms to the more
commonly spelled alternative.
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 Best match (plus similar sites).

 Product shopping and Bing cash back.

 Health information.

 Flight tracking

LOCAL INFO :

 Current traffic information

 Business listing

 People listing

 Collections

 Localized searching for restaurants and services

 Restaurant reviews

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 Movies played in an area. When a current movie title is entered in the search
box Bing will provide listings of local theaters showing the movie. When a city is
added to the search box, Bing provides the movie listings localized for that city.

 City hotel listings. When 'hotels' and a city name is entered in the search box
Bing can provide hotel listings with a map. The listing leads to a detail search
page with the hotels listed that holds extended information on the hotels and
contains links to reviews, directions reservations and bird eye view of the hotel.
On the page with the listings the list can be refined by settings on ratings,
pricing, amenities, payment and parking.

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INTEGRATION WITH HOTMAIL :

With Hotmail's "Quick Add" feature, users can insert derivatives of Bing search
results such as restaurant reviews, movie times, images, videos, and maps
directly into their e-mail messages.

International
Bing is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.

LANGUAGES
Albanian Arabic British English Bulgarian
Catalan Chinese Simplified Chinese Traditional Croatian
Czech Danish Dutch English
Estonian Finnish French German
Greek Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic
Indonesian Italian Japanese Korean
Latvian Lithuanian Malay Norwegian
Persian Polish Portuguese Portugal
Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak
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Slovenian Spanish Swedish Thai
Turkish Ukrainian

Search products :
In addition to its tool for searching web pages, Bing also provides the following search offerings:
Service Description
Bing Health refines health searches using related medical concepts to get relevant health information and to allow users to
Health navigate
complex medical topics with inline article results from experts. This feature is based on the Medstory acquisition.

Bing Images enables the user to quickly search and display most relevant photos and images of interest. The infinite scroll feature
allows browsing a large number of images quickly. The advance filters allows refining search results in terms of properties such
Images
as
image size, aspect ratio, color or black and white, photo or illustration, and facial features recognition.

Local Bing Local searches local business listings with business details and reviews, allowing users to make more informed decisions.
Bing Maps enables the user to search for businesses, addresses, landmarks and street names worldwide, and can select from a
road-map style view, a satellite view or a hybrid of the two. Also available are "bird's-eye" images for many cities worldwide, and
3D
Maps
maps which include virtual 3D navigation and to-scale terrain and 3D buildings. For business users it will be available as "Bing
Maps
For Enterprise".
Bing News is a news aggregator and provides news results relevant to the search query from a wide range of online news and
News
information services.
Bing Reference semantically indexes Wikipedia content and displays them in an enhanced view within Bing. It also allow users to
Reference input search queries that resembles full questions and highlights the answer within search results. This feature is based on the
Powerset acquisition.
Bing Shopping lets users search from a wide range of online suppliers and marketer's merchandise for all types of products and
goods.
Shopping
This service also integrates with Bing cashback offering money back for certain purchases made through the site. This feature is
based on the Jellyfish.com acquisition.
Translator Bing Translator lets users translate texts or entire web pages into different languages.
Bing Travel searches for airfare and hotel reservations online and predicts the best time to purchase them. This feature is based
Travel on the
Farecast acquisition.
Bing Twitter search allow users to search for and retrieve real-time information from the Twitter service. Bing Twitter search also
provides "best match" and "social captions" functionalities that prioritises results based on relevance and contexts. Only public
Twitter
feeds
from the past 7 days will be displayed in Bing Twitter search results.
Bing Videos enables the user to quickly search and view videos online from various websites. The Smart Preview feature allows
the
Videos
user to instantly watch a short preview of an original video. Bing Videos also allow users to access editorial video contents from
MSN Video.

Visual Search
Bing Visual Search allow users to refine their search queries for structured results through data-grouping image galleries that
resembles "large online catalogues", powered by Silverlight.
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Bing xRank lets users search for celebrities, musicians, politicians and bloggers, read short biographies and news about them, and
xRank
track their trends or popularity rankings.

Webmaster services :

Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own
websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Additionally, users may also submit
contents to Bing via the following methods:

•Bing Local Listing Center allow businesses to add business listings onto Bing
Maps and Bing Local.

•Soapbox on MSN Video allow users to upload videos for searching via Bing
Videos.

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Mobile services

Bing Mobile allow users to conduct search queries on their mobile devices, either via the
mobile browser or a downloadable mobile application. In the United States, Microsoft also

operates a toll-free number for directory assistance called Bing 411.

Other services :
Bing Tweets is a service that combines Twitter trends with Bing search results, enabling
users to see real-time information about the hottest topics on Twitter. The Bing Tweets
service was initiated on July 14, 2009 in a partnership between Microsoft, Twitter and
Federated Media.

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Toolbars, gadgets and plug-ins

TOOLBARS

Both Windows Live Toolbar and MSN Toolbar will be powered by Bing and aim to offer
users a way to access Bing search results. Together with the launch of Bing, MSN Toolbar
4.0 will be released with inclusion of new Bing-related features such as Bing cash back
offer alerts.

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GADGETS

The discontinued Live Search versions of the Windows Sidebar gadgets The Bing
Search gadget is a Windows Sidebar Gadget that uses Bing Search to fetch the

user's search results and render them directly in the gadget. Another gadget, the
Bing Maps gadget, displays real-time traffic conditions using Bing Maps. The
gadget provides shortcuts to driving directions, local search and full-screen traffic
view. However, traffic data is limited only for major US and Canadian cities,
including Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles,
Milwaukee, Montreal, New York City, Oklahoma City, Ottawa, Philadelphia,
Phoenix, Pittsburgh, Portland, Providence, Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San
Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa, Toronto, Vancouver, and
Washington, D.C.

Prior to October 30, 2007, the gadgets were known as Live Search gadget and Live
Search Maps gadget; both gadgets were removed from Windows Live Gallery due
to possible security concerns. The Live Search Maps gadget was made available for
download again on January 24, 2008 with the security concern addressed.
However around the introduction of Bing in June 2009 both gadgets have been
removed again for download from Windows Live Gallery.

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ACCELERATORS :
Accelerators allow users to access Bing features directly from selected text in a
webpage. Accelerators provided by the Bing team include:

Bing Translator
Bing Maps
Bing Shopping

WEB SLICES :
Web Slices can be used to monitor information gathered by Bing.

Web Slices provided by the Bing team include:

Weather from Bing
Finance from Bing
Traffic from Bing

PLUG-INS
The Bing team provides an official Bing Firefox add-on, which adds search
suggestions to the Firefox search box from Bing.

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40
Advertising

Live Search

Since 2006, Microsoft had conducted a number of tie-ins and promotions for
promoting Microsoft's search offerings. These include:

Amazon's A9 search service and the experimental Ms. Dewey interactive search site
syndicated all search results from Microsoft's then search engine, Live Search. This
tie-in started on May 1, 2006.

Search and Give - a promotional website launched on 17 January 2007 where all
searches done from a special portal site would lead to a donation to the UNHCR's
organization for refugee children, ninemillion.org. Reuters AlertNet reported in 2007
that the amount to be donated would be $0.01 per search, with a minimum of
$100,000 and a maximum of $250,000 (equivalent to 25 million searches). According
to the website the service was decommissioned on June 1, 2009, having donated over
$500,000 to charity and schools.

Club Bing - a promotional website where users can win prizes by playing word games
that generate search queries on Microsoft's then search service Live Search. This
website began in April 2007 as Live Search Club.

Big Snap Search - a promotional website similar to Live Search Club. This website
began in February 2008, but was discontinued shortly after.
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Live Search SearchPerks! - a promotional website which allowed users to redeem
tickets for prizes while using Microsoft's search engine. This website began on
October 1, 2008 and was decommissioned on April 15, 2009.

BING :

Bing's debut features an $80 to $100 million online, TV, print, and radio advertising
campaign in the US. The advertisements do not mention other search engines
competitors, such as Google and Yahoo, directly by name; rather, they attempt to

convince users to switch to Bing by focusing on Bing's search features and functionality.

The ads claim that Bing does a better job countering "search overload," offering more-
relevant, higher-quality results and helps you find what you're looking for faster
through the features that Bing offers that its competition does not.

NAME ORIGIN :

The word "bing" is an onomatopoeia, a word that imitates the sound it represents.
Through focus groups Microsoft decided that the name Bing was memorable, short,
easy to spell, and that it would function well as a URL around the world. The word
would remind people of the sound made during "the moment of discovery and
decision making." Microsoft was assisted by branding consultancy Interbred in their
search for the best name for the new search engine. The name also has strong
similarity to the word 'bingo', which is used to mean that something sought has been
found or realized, as is interjected when winning the game Bingo.

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Microsoft advertising strategist David Webster originally proposed the name
"Bang" for the same reasons the name Bing was ultimately chosen (easy to spell,
one syllable, and easy to remember). He noted, "It's there, it's an exclamation point
[...] It's the opposite of a question mark." This name was ultimately not chosen

because it could not be properly used as s verb in the context of an internet search.

Qi Lu, president of Microsoft Online Services, also announced that Bing's official
Chinese name is bì yìng (simplified Chinese: 必应; traditional Chinese: 必應), which
literally means "very certain to respond" or "very
certain to answer" in Chinese.

While being tested internally by Microsoft employees, Bing's codename was Kumo (
くも), which came from the Japanese word for spider (蜘蛛; くも, kumo) as well as
cloud (雲; くも, kumo), referring to the manner in which search engines "spider"
Internet resources to add them to their database, as well as cloud computing.

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LEGAL CHALLENGES :

On July 31, 2009, The Laptop Company, Inc. released a press release stating that it
is challenging Bing's trademark application, alleging that Bing may cause confusion
in the marketplace as Bing and their product BongoBing both do online product

search. A U.S. federal trademark application for 'BongoBing' was filed on August 2,
2009 by The Laptop Company, three days after the press release with a description
of an 'Comparison shopping services; Promoting the goods and services of others by
means of operating an on-line shopping mall with links to the retail web sites of
others'. Software company Terabyte Unlimited, which has a product called BootIt
Next Generation (abbreviated to BING) also contended the trademark application
on similar grounds, as did a Missouri-based design company called Bing!
Information Design.

Microsoft contends that claims by The Laptop Company and others challenging its
trademark are without merit because these other companies filed for U.S. federal
trademark applications only recently, after the filing of the Bing trademark by
Microsoft and after the service's public release. Microsoft filed for its U.S. trademark
on the name Bing on March 2, 2009 with the description "computer search engine
software; graphical user interface software, namely, toolbar software for use with
search engine software and websites.", exactly 5 months before the U.S.

federal filing by The Laptop Company. Nonetheless, The Laptop Company and other
challengers to the Bing trademark contend that they enjoy certain protections under44
common law and state laws.

Adult content :
VIDEO CONTENT :

Bing's video search tool has a preview mode that could potentially be used to preview
pornographic videos. By simply turning off safe search, users can search for and view

pornographic videos by hovering the cursor over a thumbnail, since the video and
audio, in some cases, are cached on Microsoft's Server.

Since the videos are playing within Bing instead of the site where they are hosted, the
videos are not necessarily blocked by parental control filters. Monitoring programs
designed to tell parents what sites their children have visited are likely to simply
report "Bing.com" instead of the site that actually hosts the video. The same situation
can be said about corporate filters, many of which have been fooled by this feature.
Users do not need to leave Bing's site to view these videos.

Microsoft responded in a blog post on June 4, 2009, with a short term work-around. By
adding "&adlt=strict" to the end of a query, no matter what the settings are for that
session it will return results as if safe search were set to strict. The query would look
like this: http:/ / www. bing. com/ videos/ search?q=adulttermgoeshere& adlt=strict
(case sensitive).

45

On June 12, 2009, Microsoft announced two changes regarding Bing's Smart Motion
Preview and Safe Search features. All potentially explicit images and video content
will be coming from a separate single domain, explicit.bing.net. Additionally, Bing
will also return source URL information in the query string for image and video
contents. Both changes allow both home users and corporate users to filter content by

domain regardless of what the Safe Search settings might be.

Regional censorship :

Bing censors results for adult search terms like "sex" for some of the regions
including India, People's Republic of China, Germany and Arab countries. This
censoring is done based on the local laws of those countries.

However, Bing allows users to simply change their country/region preference to
somewhere without restrictions – such as the United States, United Kingdom,
Ireland or Australia – to sidestep this censorship.

46

CRITICISM :

Censorship in China :

Microsoft has been criticized for censoring Bing search results to queries made in

simplified Chinese characters in Mainland China. Although Microsoft has been less
than transparent in addressing the reasons why, it is widely presumed this is done to
comply with the internet filtering requirements of the communist leadership in
China. Microsoft has not indicated a willingness to stop censoring search results in
China in the wake of Google's decision to do so.

PERFORMANCE ISSUES :

Bing has been known for being slower to index sites than Google or Yahoo! It has also
been criticized for not indexing certain sites at all.

47

See also

Windows Live
Google search

Yahoo! Search
List of search engines
Page Hunt

External links

Bing
Bing for Mobile
Discover Bing
Decision Engine
Bing Community
Bing Toolbox - for developers and webmasters.
Bing Visual Search.

48

References:

http://www.bing.com
http://www.bing.com/community/forums/p/653570/ 9582219.aspx
http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/021475.html

http://www.bing.com/
http://m.bing.com/
http://www.discoverbing.com/
http://www.decisionengine.com/
http://www.bing.com/community
http://www.bing.com/toolbox
http://www.bing.com/visualsearch
http://www.wikipedia.org/

49

Yahoo! Search

The Yahoo Years

Yahoo started life back in 1994, its humble beginnings were the confines of a
university campus trailer, Yahoo started life as a collection of favorites put together
by a couple of clever chaps called David Filo and Jerry Yang.

At this time point who would ever of guessed that this humble beginning would
evolve into a global brand, lets face it the first recordable name given to this
collection of Internet information was ‘Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide
Web’ the acronym for this – JDGWWW doesn’t really aspire to becoming a world
leading brand.

The collection matured and expanded and soon there were categories and sub
categories and this concept became the basic structure for what we see today.
Obviously JDGWWW was a non starter as a name and probably never came into the 50
heads of these clever guys, however the physical structure was growing and soon
their attention did indeed turn to the subject of brand.

Yahoo is Born

Yahoo was born from a definition:- ‘uncouth, rude and unsophisticated’, of course there
is a connection between this definition and the cry of ‘Yahoo’, that many recognize as
being a loud way to show excitement. The common train of thought is that Yahoo was

chosen due to its acronym association with the term: “Yet Another Hierarchical
Officious Oracle,” although there are variations of this such as “Yet Another
Hierarchical Obstreperous Oracle,” and even “Yet Another Hierarchical Odiferous
Oracle,” but this according to Mr Filo and Mr Yang is not correct.

Within 12 months this collection of categories and sub categories would gain such
popularity that it would break the threshold of one million hits in a single day. This
obviously underlined the growing need to marry up the ‘peoples’ need for information
with the Internet itself. This interest and popularity continued to grow rapidly and the
guys realized they had the making of a business on their hands.

Soon investment followed with a respected venture capital company (Sequoia Capital)
and the boys were in business. Two years later the company was incorporated with a
successful IPO and the brand continued to gain strength.

51

52

Yahoo! Search is a web search engine, owned by Yahoo! Inc. and was as of December
2009, the 2nd largest search engine on the web by query volume, at 6.29%, after its
competitor Google at 85.35% and before Bing at 3.27%,
according to Net Applications.

Originally, Yahoo! Search started as a web directory of other websites, organized in a
hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages. In the late 1990s, Yahoo! evolved
into a full-fledged portal with a search interface and, by 2007, a limited version of
selection-based search.

Yahoo! Search, originally referred to as Yahoo! provided Search interface, would send
queries to a searchable index of pages supplemented with its directory of sites. The
results were presented to the user under the Yahoo! brand.

Originally, none of the actual web crawling and storage/retrieval of data was done by
Yahoo! itself. In 2001 the searchable index was powered by Inktomi and later was
powered by Google until 2004, when Yahoo! Search became independent. Yahoo!
Search major competitors are: Google Search, Bing and Ask Search.

On July 29, 2009, Microsoft and Yahoo! announced a deal in which Bing would power
Yahoo! Search.

53

URL search.yahoo.com
Type of site Search Engine
Commercial? Yes

Available Multilingual (40)
language(s)
Owner Yahoo
Created by Yahoo
Launched March 1, 1995
Alexa rank 4

54

Search technology acquisition
Seeking to provide its own search engine results, Yahoo! acquired their own search
technology.

In 2002, they bought Inktomi, a "behind the scenes" or OEM search engine provider,
whose results are shown on other companies' websites and powered Yahoo! in its
earlier days. In 2003, they purchased Overture Services, Inc., which owned the All
the Web and AltaVista search engines. Initially, even though Yahoo! owned multiple
search engines, they didn't use them on the main yahoo.com website, but kept using
Google's search engine for its results.

Starting in 2003, Yahoo! Search became its own web crawler-based search engine,
with a reinvented crawler called Yahoo! Slurp. Yahoo! Search combined the
capabilities of all the search engine companies they had acquired, with its existing
research, and put them into a single search engine. The new search engine results
were included in all of Yahoo!'s sites that had a web search function. Yahoo! also
started to sell the search engine results to other companies, to show on their own web
sites. Their relationship with Google was terminated at that time, with the former
partners becoming each other's main competitors.

In October 2007, Yahoo! Search was updated with a more modern appearance in line
with the redesigned Yahoo! home page. In addition, Search Assist was added; which
provides real-time query suggestions and related concepts as they are typed.
55

In July 2008, Yahoo! Search announced the introduction of a new service called
"Build Your Own Search Service,“ or BOSS. This service opens the doors for
developers to use Yahoo!'s system for indexing information and images and create
their own custom search engine.

In July 2009, Yahoo! signed a deal with Microsoft, the result of which was that
Yahoo! Search would be powered by Bing.

Yahoo! Search blog & announcements

The team at Yahoo! Search frequently blogged about search announcements,
features, updates and enhancements. The Yahoo! Search Blog, as stated provided A
look inside the world of search from the people at Yahoo!. This included index
updates named Weather Updates and their Yahoo! Search Assist feature.

International presence

Yahoo! Search also provided their search interface in at least 38 international
markets and a variety of available languages. Yahoo! has a presence in Europe,
Asia and across the Emerging Markets.

56

Languages

Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese
Chinese Croatian Czech Danish

(traditional)
Dutch English Estonian Finnish
French German Greek Hebrew
Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian
Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian
Malay Norwegian Persian Polish
Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian
Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish
Tagalog Thai Turkish Vietnamese

57

YAHOO! SERVICES

Address Book Answers Autos Calendar
Dainik Jagran Education Finance Flickr

Games Groups Health International
Local Maps Movies Music
News Omg Real Estate Shine
Shopping Sports Travel TV
Yahoo! en Español Downloads Downloads Get Yahoo! on
Get the Yahoo! Your Phone
Toolbar
Get Yahoo! on Your More
Tablet Services

58

Yahoo Mail:

Yahoo! Mail (shortened to Y! Mail) is a free web mail service provided by Yahoo!. It
was inaugurated in 1997. According to comScore, Yahoo! Mail is the second largest
web-based e-mail service with 273.1 million users as of November 2010.

Currently, Yahoo! offers three versions of Yahoo! Mail: the traditional full-page-
scroll "Yahoo! Mail Classic," which continues the availability of the simpler 1997-
2006 interface for the brand's considerable installed base of users, an Outlook-like
Ajax interface based upon code the company acquired from Oddpost in 2004, and
"Yahoo Mail Beta" which includes a new design and reportedly enhanced
performance, improved search functionality, and improved Facebook integration. In
early 2008, Yahoo! started offering unlimited mail storage to its users, in response
to heated competition in the free-web mail market segment.

On June 27, 2009, Yahoo! Messenger was integrated with Yahoo! Mail.

59

Yahoo! Answers
Yahoo! Answers (Formerly known as Yahoo! Q & A) is a community-driven question-
and-answer (Q&A) site launched by Yahoo! on July 5, 2005 that allows users to both
submit questions to be answered and answer questions asked by other users. The
site gives members the chance to earn points as a way to encourage participation

and is based on Naver's Knowledge iN. Yahoo! Answers is available in 12 languages,
but several Asian sites operate a different platform which allows for non-Latin
characters. The platform is known as Yahoo! Chiebukuro (Yahoo!) in Japan, and
Yahoo! Knowledge in Korea, Taiwan, China, and Hong Kong[citation needed]. An
Arabic language Q&A platform called Seen Jeem is available through the Yahoo!
subsidiary Maktoob.

Yahoo! Answers was created to replace Ask Yahoo!, their former Q&A platform
which was discontinued in March 2006.

Yahoo! Answers is the second most popular Q&A site in the US after Answers.com,
according to comScore.

60

Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo! Finance is a service from Yahoo! that provides financial information. It is the
top financial news and research website in the United States, with more than 23
million visitors in February 2010, according to comScore.

Yahoo! Finance offers information including stock quotes, stock exchange rates,
corporate press releases and financial reports, and popular message boards for
discussing a company's prospects and stock valuation. It also offers some hosted tools
for personal finance management. Yahoo! Finance Worldwide offers similar portals
localized to assorted large countries in South America, Europe, and Asia.

61

Yahoo! Site Explorer:

There's only a few basic features here, which includes the ability to see:
A list of links that point to a given URL

A list of links that point to a given fully-qualified domain (e.g.,
southernfood.about.com,www.trusstechnosofts.com , or reddit.com)
A list of links that point to a given pay-level domain (e.g., *.about.com,
*.seomoz.org, or *.reddit.com - including all their respective subdomains)
A modifier that removes links coming from internal pages, either on the fully-
qualified or pay-level domain

Using Site Explorer is simple - just enter a given URL and go (or type a standard
link or link domain search query into Yahoo! Search and you'll be re-directed). You'll
be given options to modify the domain parameters and exclusions in the results.

62

63

Selection-based search

On June 20, 2007, Yahoo! introduced a selection-based search feature called Yahoo!
Shortcuts. When activated this selection-based search feature enabled users to invoke
search using only their mouse and receive search suggestions in floating windows

while remaining on Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo! Mail. This feature was only
active on Yahoo web pages or pages within the Yahoo! Publisher Network. Yahoo!
Shortcuts required the content-owner to modify the underlying HTML of his or her
webpage to call out the specific keywords to be enhanced. The technology for context-
aware selection-based search on Yahoo pages was first developed by Reiner Kraft

Search Scan

On May 11, 2008, Yahoo! Introduced Search Scan. If enabled this add-on/feature
enhanced Yahoo! Search by automatically alerting users of viruses, spyware and
spam websites.

64

Search verticals

Yahoo! Search provided the ability to search across numerous vertical properties
outside just the Web at large. These included Images, Videos, Local, Shopping,
Yahoo! Answers, Audio, Directory, Jobs, News, Mobile, Travel and various other

services as listed on their About Yahoo! Search page.

65

Yahoo! Directory
The Yahoo! Directory is a web directory that rivals the Open Directory Project in
size. The directory was Yahoo!'s first offering. When Yahoo! changed to crawler-
based listings for its main results in October 2002, the human-edited directory's
significance dropped, but it was still being updated in August 2010. The Yahoo!

Directory offers two options for suggesting websites for possible listing: "Standard",
which is free, and a paid submission process that offers expedited review.
Payment is required when suggesting a commercial site.

Yahoo! provides both a search engine
and a directory service, and the
directory is searchable separately
from the rest of their search engine
results.

While Yahoo! has closed a number of
country-specific directories, the
company has stated that it currently
"has no plans to close the main
Yahoo! Directory
66

Yahoo Flickr

Flickr is an image hosting and video hosting website, web services suite, and
online community created by Ludicorp and later acquired by Yahoo!. In
addition to being a popular website for users to share and embed personal

photographs, the service is widely used by bloggers to host images that they
embed in blogs and social media. In September 2010, it reported that it was
hosting more than 5 billion images. For mobile users, Flickr has an official app
for iPhone, BlackBerry and for Windows Phone 7, but not for other mobile
devices.

67

Delicious Bookmarking

Delicious (formerly del.icio.us, pronounced "delicious") is a social
bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web
bookmarks. The site was founded by Joshua Schachter in 2003 and

acquired by Yahoo! in 2005, then sold to AVOS Systems on April 27,
2011.By the end of 2008, the service claimed more than 5.3 million users
and 180 million unique bookmarked URLs. It is headquartered in
Sunnyvale, California.

68

Yahoo! Music Videos

Yahoo! Music puts users in control over their content. Yahoo! Music and its worldwide
syndication provide users with up-to-date videos, concerts and interviews while
archiving old materials for new users to discover.

Function

Yahoo! Music's video page allows users to enjoy the latest music video from their
favorite artist or discover new artists. Yahoo! helps musicians gain or sustain
exposure while letting fans watch the newest videos. Fans also enjoy videos from
live performances, video premieres and Yahoo! Music exclusive interviews.

Features

The site features a Browse section that allows users to search for videos by genre.
There's a panel for the top 100 music videos and a panel for the newest videos.
There are several features that help users discover new artists. The
"Recommended Artists" panel suggests some well-rounded artists, while the
"Video Stations" panel can help find something new by organizing content into
thematic channels.

69

70
Yahoo! Local Listings

Yahoo! Local Listings is an online local advertising system that gives businesses the
ability to provide detailed business information to millions of potential customers on
Yahoo! Local. Three products currently make up Yahoo! Local Listings:

Basic Listings are free of charge and allow business owners to add listings to
Yahoo! Local and include important details such as:

operation information (hours of operation, accepted payment methods, etc.)
services provided & products sold
a link to a web site (when applicable)

Your business can stand out from the crowd with the Enhanced Listing option. In
addition to the Basic Listing features, Enhanced Listings also include:

up to ten photos
a company tagline
a long description that is searchable by Yahoo! users
two additional links to a web site (when applicable)
performance reports

71

Yahoo! Advertising

Open a Microsoft Advertising adCenter account and you'll be able to reach more
than 159 million searchers in the U.S. and Canada1 on Yahoo! Search, Bing and

our partners.

72

Yahoo! Maps

Yahoo! Maps is a free online mapping portal provided by Yahoo!.

73

See also

• Yahoo! Directory
• Yahoo! Next
• List of search engines

• Yahoo! Search BOSS
• Yahoo! Search Monkey

External links

• Yahoo! Search
• Search Engines: costs vs. benefits (Page refreshes is not considered here)

References
http://search.yahoo.com/
Alexa yahoo traffic results" (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/yahoo.com ).
Yahoo! Search Blog (http://www.ysearchblog.com/ )
Yahoo! international presence (http://world.yahoo.com/ )
Advanced Search (http://search.yahoo.com/web/advanced?ei=UTF-8 )
Search Basics tutorial (http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/search/basics/ )
Yahoo! Shortcuts (http://www.ysearchblog.com/archives/000462.html )
Yahoo! SearchScan information page (http://tools.search.yahoo.com/newsearch/searchscan )
About Yahoo! Search (http://tools.search.yahoo.com/about/forsearchers.html )
74
http://search.yahoo.Com
http://www.johnsankey.ca/searchbots.html

Google Search

URL www.googlr.com
Commercial Yes

Type of site Search engine
Available languages Multilingual (124)
Owner Google
Created by Brin and larry pages
Launched September 15, 1997
Alexa rank 1
Revenue From adwords

75

Google Search or Google Web Search is a web search engine owned by Google Inc. and
is the most-used search engine on the Web. Google receives several hundred million
queries each day through its various services. The main purpose of Google Search is to
hunt for text in web pages, as opposed to other data, such as with Google Image
Search. Google search was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin in
1997.

Google Search provides more than 22 special features beyond the original word-search
capability.These include synonyms, weather forecasts, time zones, stock quotes, maps,
earthquake data, movie showtimes, airports, home listings, and sports scores. (see
below: Special features). There are special features for numbers including prices,
76
temperatures, money/unit conversions ("10.5 cm in inches"), calculations ( 3*4+sqrt(6)-
pi/2 ), package tracking, patents, area codes, and rudimentary language translation of
displayed pages.

The order of search results on Google's search-results pages is based on a priority rank
called a "PageRank". Google Search provides many options for customized search (see
below: Search options), such as: exclusion ("-xx"), inclusion ("+xx"), alternatives ("xx OR
yy"), and wildcard ("x * x").

Search results

The exact percentage of the total of web pages that Google indexes is not known, as it
is very hard to actually calculate. Google not only indexes and caches web pages but
also takes "snapshots" of other file types, which include PDF, Word documents, Excel
spreadsheets, Flash SWF, plain text files, and so on. Except in the case of text and
SWF files, the cached version is a conversion to (X)HTML, allowing those without the
corresponding viewer application to read the file.

Users can customize the search engine, by setting a default language, using the
"SafeSearch" filtering technology and set the number of results shown on each page.
Google has been criticized for placing long-term cookies on users‘ machines to store
these preferences, a tactic which also enables them to track a user's search terms and
retain the data for more than a year. For any query, up to the first 1000 results can be
shown with a maximum of 100 displayed per page.

77

Non-indexable data

Despite its immense index, there is also a considerable amount of data available in
online databases which are accessible by means of queries but not by links. This so-
called invisible or deep Web is minimally covered by Google and other search engines.

The deep Web contains library catalogs, official legislative documents of governments,
phone books, and other content which is dynamically prepared to respond to a query.

Privacy in some countries forbids the showing of some links. For instance in
Switzerland every private person can force Google Inc. to delete a link, which contains
their name.

Functionality

The Google search engine has many intuitive features making it more functional.
Google search consists of a series of localized websites. The largest of those, the
google.com site, is the top most-visited website in the world. Some of its features
include a definition link for most searches including dictionary words, the number of
results you got on your search, links to other searches (e.g. for words that Google
believes to be misspelled, it provides a link to the search results using its proposed
spelling), and many more.

78

Search syntax

Google's search engine normally accepts queries as a simple text, and breaks up the
user's text into a sequence of search terms, which will usually be words that are to

occur in the results, but may also be phrases, delimited by quotations marks ("),
qualified terms, with a prefix such as "+", "-", or one of several advanced operators,
such as "site:". The WebPages of "Google Search Basics " describe each of these
additional queries and options (see below: Search options).

Google's Advanced Search web form gives several additional fields which may be used
to qualify searches by such criteria as date of first retrieval. All advanced queries
transform to regular queries, usually with additional qualified terms.

Query expansion

Google applies query expansion to the submitted search query, transforming it into the
query that will actually be used to retrieve results. As with page ranking, the exact
details of the algorithm Google uses are deliberately obscure, but certainly the
following transformations are among those that occur:

• Term reordering: in information retrieval this is a standard technique to reduce the
work involved in retrieving results. This transformation is invisible to the user, since
79
the results ordering uses the original query order to determine relevance.

• Stemming is used to increase search quality by keeping small syntactic variants of
search terms.

• There is a limited facility to fix possible misspellings in queries.

"I'm Feeling Lucky“

Google's homepage includes a button labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky". When a user clicks
on the button the user will be taken directly to the first search result, bypassing the
search engine results page. The thought is that if a user is "feeling lucky", the search
engine will return the perfect match the first time without having to page through the
search results. According to a study by Tom Chavez of "Rapt", this feature costs
Google $110 million a year as 1% of all searches use this feature and bypass all
advertising.

On October 30, 2009, for some users, the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button was removed
from Google's main page, along with the regular search button. Both buttons were
replaced with a field that reads, "This space intentionally left blank." This text fades
out when the mouse is moved on the page, and normal search functionality is
achieved by filling in the search field with the desired terms and pressing enter. A
Google spokesperson explains, "This is just a test, and a way for us to gauge whether
our users will like an even simpler search interface." Personalized Google homepages
retained both buttons and their normal functions. 80

Rich Snippets

On 12 May 2009, Google announced that they would be parsing the hCard, hReview,
and hProduct microformats and using them to populate search result pages with what
they called "Rich Snippets".

Special features

Besides the main search-engine feature of searching for text, Google Search has more
than 22 "special features“ (activated by entering any of dozens of trigger words) when
searching:

• weather – The weather conditions, temperature, wind, humidity, and forecast, for
many cities, can be viewed by typing "weather" along with a city for larger cities or
city and state, U.S. zip code, or city and country for smaller cities (such as: weather
Lawrence, Kansas; weather Paris; weather Bremen, Germany).

• stock quotes – The market data for a specific company or fund can be viewed, by
typing the ticker symbol (or include "stock"), such as: CSCO; MSFT; IBM stock; F
stock (lists Ford Motor Co.); or AIVSX (fund). Results show inter-day changes, or 5-
year graph, etc. This does not work for stock names which are one letter long, such as
Citigroup (C) or Macy's (M) (Ford being an exception), or are common words, such as
Diamond Offshore (DO) or Majesco (COOL).
81
• time – The current time in many cities (worldwide), can be viewed by typing "time"
and the name of the city (such as: time Cairo; time Pratt, KS).

sports scores – The scores and schedules, for sports teams, can be displayed by
typing the team name or league name into the search box.

• unit conversion – Measurements can be converted, by entering each phrase, such
as: 10.5 cm in inches; or 90 km in miles

• currency conversion – A money or currency converter can be selected, by typing
the names or currency codes (listed by ISO 4217): 6789 Euro in USD; 150 GBP in
USD; 5000 Yen in USD; 5000 Yuan in lira (the U.S. dollar can be USD or "US$" or
"$", while Canadian is CAD, etc.).

• calculator – Calculation results can be determined, as calculated live, by entering
a formula in numbers or words, such as: 6*77 +pi +sqrt(e^3)/888 plus 0.45. The user
is given the option to sear ch for the formula, after calculation. The calculator also
uses the unit and currency conversion functions to allow unit-aware calculations.

For example, "(3 EUR/liter) / (40 miles/gallon) in USD / mile" calculates the dollar cost
per mile for a 40 mpg car with gas costing 3 euros a liter.

• dictionary lookup – A definition for a word or phrase can be found, by entering
"define" plus the word(s) to lookup (such as: Define philosophy)

• maps – Some related maps can be displayed, by typing in the name or U.S. ZIP
code of a location and the word "map" (such as: New York map; Kansas map; or Paris82
map).

• movie showtimes – Reviews or film showtimes can be listed for any movies
playing nearby, by typing "movies" or the name of any current film into the search
box. If a specific location was saved on a previous search, the top search result will
display showtimes for nearby theaters for that movie. These listings however are
sometimes totally incorrect and there is no way to ask Google to correct them; for

example, on 25 July, for the El Capitan Theatre, google showtimes lists Up but
according to the El Capitan website, the only movie playing that day is G-Force.

• public data – Trends for population (or unemployment rates) can be found for
U.S. states & counties, by typing "population" or "unemployment rate" followed by a
state or county name.

• real estate and housing – Home listings in a given area can be displayed, using
the trigger words "housing", "home", or "real estate" followed by the name of a city or
U.S. zip code.

• travel data/airports – The flight status for arriving or departing U.S. flights can
be displayed, by typing in the name of the airline and the flight number into the
search box (such as: American airlines 18). Delays at a specific airport can also be
viewed (by typing the name of the city or three-letter airport code plus word
"airport").

83

• package tracking – Package mail can be tracked by typing the tracking number
of a Royal Mail, UPS, Fedex or USPS package directly into the search box. Results
will include quick links to track the status of each shipment.

• patent numbers – U.S. patents can be searched by entering the word "patent"
followed by the patent number into the search box (such as: Patent 5123123).

• area code – The geographical location (for any U.S. telephone area code) can be
displayed by typing a 3-digit area code (such as: 650).

• synonym search – A search can match words similar to those specified, by
placing the tilde sign (~) immediately in front of a search term, such as: ~fast food.

• U.S. Government search – Searching of U.S. government websites can be
performed from webpage: www.google.com/unclesam.

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Search options

The webpages maintained by the Google Help Center have text describing more than
15 various search options. The Google operators:

• OR – Search for either one, such as "price high OR low" searches for "price" with
"high" or "low".

• "-" – Search while excluding a word, such as "apple -tree" searches where word
"tree" is not used.

• "+" – Force inclusion of a word, such as "Name +of +the Game" to require the words
"of" & "the" to appear on a matching page.

• "*" – Wildcard operator to match any words between other specific words.
Some of the query options are as follows:

• define: – The query prefix "define:" will provide a definition of the words listed after
it.

• stocks: – After "stocks:" the query terms are treated as stock ticker symbols for
lookup.

• site: – Restrict the results to those websites in the given domain, such as,85
site:www.acmeacme.com. The option "site:com" will search all domain URLs named
with ".com" (no space after "site:").

• allintitle: – Only the page titles are searched (not the remaining text on each
webpage).

• intitle: – Prefix to search in a webpage title, such as "intitle:google search" will list

pages with word "google“ in title, and word "search" anywhere (no space after
"intitle:").

• allinurl: – Only the page URL address lines are searched (not the text inside each
webpage).

• inurl: – Prefix for each word to be found in the URL; others words are matched
anywhere, such as "inurl:acme search" matches "acme" in a URL, but matches
"search" anywhere (no space after "inurl:"). The page-display options (or query types)
are:
• cache: – Highlights the search-words within the cached document, such as
"cache:www.google.com xxx" shows cached content with word "xxx" highlighted.

• link: – The prefix "link:" will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage,
such as "link:www.google.com" lists webpages linking to the Google homepage.

• related: – The prefix "related:" will list webpages that are "similar" to a specified
web page.
86

• info: – The prefix "info:" will display some background information about one
specified webpage, such as, info:www.google.com. Typically, the info is the first text
(160 bytes, about 23 words) contained in the page, displayed in the style of a results
entry (for just the 1 page as matching the search).

• filetype: - results will only show files of the desired type (ex filetype:pdf will return
pdf files) Note that Google searches the HTML coding inside a webpage, not the
screen appearance: the words displayed on a screen might not be listed in the same
order in the HTML coding.

Error messages

Some searches will give a 403 Forbidden error with the text

"We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or
spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if
you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a
virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses
and other spurious software. 87

We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.“
sometimes followed by a CAPTCHA prompt.

The screen was first reported in 2005, and was a response to the heavy use of Google
by search engine optimization companies to check on ranks of sites they were
optimizing. The message is triggered by high volumes of requests from a single IP
address. Google apparently uses the Google cookie as part of its determination of
refusing service.

In June 2009, after the death of pop superstar Michael Jackson, this message
appeared to many internet users who were searching Google for news stories related
to the singer, and was assumed by Google to be a DDoS attack, although many
queries were legitimate searchers.
January 2009 malware bug

A screen-shot of the error of January 31, 2009 Google flags search results with the
message "This site may harm your computer" if the site is known to install malicious
software in the background or otherwise surreptitiously. Google does this to protect
users against visiting sites that could harm their computers. For approximately 40
minutes on January 31, 2009, all search results were mistakenly classified as
malware and could therefore not be clicked; instead a warning message was
displayed and the user was required to enter the requested URL manually. The bug
was caused by human error. The URL of "/" (which expands to all URLs) was
mistakenly checked in as a value to the file.

88

89

Google Doodle

On certain occasions, the logo on Google's webpage will change to a special version,
known as a "Google Doodle". Clicking on the Doodle links to a string of Google search

results about the topic. The first was a reference to the Burning Man Festival in
1998, and others have been produced for the birthdays of notable people like Albert
Einstein, historical events like the interlocking Lego block's 50th anniversary and
holidays like Valentine's Day.

Google Caffeine

In August 2009, Google announced the rollout of a new search architecture,
codenamed "Caffeine". The new architecture was designed to return results faster
and to better deal with rapidly updated information from services including Facebook
and Twitter. Google developers noted that most users would notice little immediate
change, but invited developers to test the new search in its sandbox. One change that
was noticeable was the search return time. In numerous tests it returned results in
nearly half the time. Other differences noted for their impact upon Search Engine
Optimization included heavier keyword weighting and the importance of the
domain's age.

The move was interpreted in some quarters as a response to Microsoft's recent
release of an upgraded version of its own search service, renamed Bing. 90

International

Google is available in many languages and has been localized for many countries.

Google support 124 languages.

Arabic Bulgarian Catalan Chinese
Chinese Croatian Czech Danish
(traditional)
Dutch English Estonian Finnish
French German Greek Hebrew
Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Italian
Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian
Malay Norwegian Persian Polish
Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian
Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish
Tagalog Thai Turkish Vietnamese
91

Domain names
In addition to the main URL Google.com , Google Inc. owns 160 domain names for each
of the countries/regions in which it has been localized. As Google is an American
company, the main domain name can be considered as the U.S. one. For a list of the
current domain names, see page: {{Google.com}}. Some domain names unregistered by

Google are currently squatted, such as "Google.ua" (for Ukraine, where the correct
URL is "google.com.ua“ india Url www.google.in).

Search products

In addition to its tool for searching webpages, Google also provides services for
searching images, Usenet newsgroups, news websites, videos, searching by locality,
maps, and items for sale online. In 2006, Google has indexed over 25 billion web
pages,[36] 400 million queries per day, 1.3 billion images, and over one billion
Usenet messages. It also caches much of the content that it indexes. Google operates
other tools and services including Google News, Google Suggest, Google Product
Search, Google Maps, Google Co-op, Google Earth, Google Blog Search and Google
Desktop Search. There are also products available from Google that are not directly
search-related. Gmail, for example, is a webmail application, but still includes search
features; Google Browser Sync does not offer any search facilities, although it
aims to organize your browsing time.

Also Google starts many new beta products, like Google Social Search or Google Image
92
Swirl.

Google Services

Google +1 Button
The +1 button is shorthand for "this is pretty cool" or "you should check this out.“

Click +1 to publicly give something your stamp of approval. Your +1's can help
friends, contacts, and others on the web find the best stuff when they search.

URL: www.google.com/+1/button/

93

Google AdSense

Google AdSense is a free, simple way for website publishers of all sizes to earn
money by displaying targeted Google ads on their websites.

Url: www.google.com/adsense

94

Google Adwords
Advertise with Google AdWords ads in the Sponsored Links section next to search
results to boost website traffic and sales. With Google AdWords pay-per-click (PPC)
keyword advertising, you only pay for results. AdWords is an essential online

marketing solution for any website owner and any type of business.

URL: http://adwords.google.com/

95

Google Alerts
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.)
based on your choice of query or topic.

Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you'll
receive. Some handy uses of Google Alerts include:

 monitoring a developing news story.
 keeping current on a competitor or industry.
 getting the latest on a celebrity or event.
 keeping tabs on your favorite sports teams.

URL: http://www.google.com/alerts

96

Google Analytics
Google Analytics is the enterprise-class web analytics solution that gives you rich
insights into your website traffic and marketing effectiveness. Powerful, flexible and

easy-to-use features now let you see and analyze your traffic data in an entirely new
way. With Google Analytics, you're more prepared to write better-targeted ads,
strengthen your marketing initiatives and create higher converting websites.

URL: http://www.google.com/analytics/

97

Google App Engine
Google App Engine enables you to build and host web apps on the same systems that
power Google applications. App Engine offers fast development and deployment;
simple administration, with no need to worry about hardware, patches or backups;

and effortless scalability.

URL: http://code.google.com/appengine/

98

Google blogger
Free weblog publishing tool from Google, for sharing text, photos and video.

URL: www.blogger.com

99

Google Bookmarks
Access your Bookmarks on any computer, and use Lists to share them with friends.

URL: www.google.com/bookmarks

100

Google Buzz
Start conversations about the things you find interesting. Share updates, photos, videos
and more with your friends.

URL: http://www.google.com/buzz

101

Google Calendar

Never forget another event. Get event reminders via email or have text messages sent
right to your mobile phone.

URL: www.google.com/calendar

102

Google Custom Search

With Google Custom Search, you can harness the power of Google to create a
customized search experience for your own website.

URL: www.google.com/cse

103

Google Docs

Create and share your work online and access your documents from anywhere.
Manage documents, spreadsheets, presentations, surveys, and more all in one easy
way.

URL: http://docs.google.com

104

Google Feedburner

Official FeedBurner Help Center where you can find tips and tutorials on using
FeedBurner and other answers to frequently asked questions.

URL: http://feedburner.google.com

105

Gmail
Google-owned, web-based email service provides details of storage, options and links
to related services.

URL: http://mail.google.com/mail

106

Google hotpot
Sign in to rate places and get personalized recommendations.

URL: www.google.com/hotpot

107

Google Places

Google Places for Business to get your business found on local search results on both
Google Search and Google Maps.

URL: www.google.com/places/

108

PageRank

Google's rise to success was in large part due to a patented algorithm called
PageRank that helps rank web pages that match a given search string. Previous

keyword-based methods of ranking search results, used by many search engines that
were once more popular than Google, would rank pages by how often the search
terms occurred in the page, or how strongly associated the search terms were within
each resulting page. The PageRank algorithm instead analyses human-generated
links, assuming that web pages linked from many important pages are themselves
likely to be important. The algorithm computes a recursive score for pages, based on
the weighted sum of the PageRanks of the pages linking to them. PageRank is
thought to correlate well with human concepts of importance. In addition to
PageRank, Google over the years has added many other secret criteria for
determining the ranking of pages on result lists, reported to be over 200 different
indicators. The details are kept secret due to spammers and in order to maintain an
advantage over Google's competitors.

109

Google Page Speed

Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to
make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and
increase conversion rates

URL: http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/

110

Google Profiles
Decide what the world sees when it searches for you. Display the information you care
about and make it easy for visitors to get to know you.

URL: https://profiles.google.com/

111

Google URL Shortener
Google URL Shortener at goo.gl is used by Google products to create short URLs that
can be easily shared, tweeted, or emailed to friends.

URL: http://goo.gl/

112

iGoogle
iGoogle is your personalized Google page. Add news, photos, weather, and stuff from
across the web to your page.

Url: www.google.com/ig

113

Google Maps

Google Maps (formerly Google Local) is a web mapping service application and
technology provided by Google, free (for non-commercial use), that powers many
map-based services, including the Google Maps website, Google Ride Finder, Google

Transit, and maps embedded on third-party websites via the Google Maps API.

URL: http://maps.google.com

114

Google Merchant Center
Google Merchant Center is a tool which helps you upload your product listings to be
used for Google Product Search, Google Product Ads, and Google Commerce Search.

URL: www.google.com/merchants

115

Google Mobile

Search Google for free from your mobile phone with Google Mobile App. Get Google
Maps, Sync, Gmail, YouTube, and Latitude for your phone. Never be stumped with
Google mobile in your pocket. Available for BlackBerry, iPhone, Windows

URL: www.google.com/mobile

116

Orkut

Social networking and discussion site operated by Google.

URL: www.orkut.com

117

Subscribed Links
Subscribed Links let you create custom search results that users can add to their
Google search pages. You can display links to your services for your customers,
provide news and status information updated in near-real-time, answer questions,

calculate useful quantities, and more.

http://www.google.com/coop/subscribedlinks/

118

Picasa Web Albums
Fast and easy photo sharing from Google. Share with friends and family, or explore
public photos.

URL: http://picasaweb.google.com/

119

Google Reader

Read them in one place with Google Reader, where keeping up with your favorite
websites is as easy as checking your email.

120

Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools provides you with detailed reports about your pages' visibility
on Google. To get started, simply add and verify your site and you'll start to see
information right away.

URL: www.google.com/webmasters/tools

121

Website Optimizer

Website Optimizer, Google’s free website testing and optimization tool, allows you to
increase the value of your existing websites and traffic without spending a cent. Using
Website Optimizer to test and optimize site content and design, you can quickly and

easily increase revenue and ROI whether you’re new to marketing or an expert.

URL: www.google.com/websiteoptimizer

122

YouTube

YouTube is a place to discover, watch, upload and share videos.

URL: www.youtube.com

123

Google Translate

Google's free online language translation service instantly translates text and web
pages. This translator supports: English, Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic

URL: http://translate.google.com

124

Google Trends
Google Trends provides insights into broad search patterns. Please keep in mind that
several approximations are used when computing these results.
URL: www.google.com/trends

125

Google Keyword Tool
Enter one keyword or phrase per line to see what related word searches your ad will
show on.

URL: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

126

Energy consumption
Google claims that a search query requires altogether about 1 kJ or 0.0003 kW·h.

See also

• Googlewhack
• Goojje
• History of Google
• List of Google products
• List of search engines

External links

• Google.com
• Blogpost.com , Evolution of Google Home Page from 1998 to 2008
• Web.Archive.org , A cached page of Google from 1998

127

References
http://www.google.com/

"WHOIS - google.com" (http://reports.internic.net/cgi/whois?whois_nic=google.com&
type=domain ). . Retrieved 2009-01-27.

"Alexa Google traffic results" (http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details/google.
com ) Alexa. . Retrieved 2009-11-15.

"Alexa Search Engine ranking" (http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/google.com+yahoo.
Com+altavista.com). . Retrieved 2009-11-15.

Language Tools (http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en )

Google, Web Crawling and Distributed Synchronization
http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/cis555/slides/I-Crawlers-
Sync.ppt)p.11.Blogspot.com

(http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/powering-google-search.html ),
Powering a Google search

http://seo-kolkata.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-home-page-evolution-from-1998-
to.Html
128
http://web.archive.org/web/19981202230410/http://www.google.com/

Search Engines Market Share

129
Source: http://www.statowl.com/search_engine_market_share.php

Search TOTAL DEC '10 JAN '11 FEB '11 MAR '11 APR '11 MAY '11

Engine AVG
Google 78.48% 78.27% 77.41% 79.65% 78.37% 78.84% 78.51%
Bing 9.26% 8.99% 9.91% 8.69% 9.40% 9.07% 9.45%
Yahoo 9.14% 9.32% 9.67% 8.52% 9.11% 9.08% 9.06%
Ask 1.72% 1.98% 1.54% 1.68% 1.68% 1.71% 1.74%
AOL 1.38% 1.43% 1.45% 1.44% 1.42% 1.29% 1.22%
Other 0.02% 0.02% 0.02% 0.02% 0.02% 0.01% 0.01%

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