Frederick Jace
Search engines have become part of daily life. Whether it is to find a local vet or a hard-to-find gift. With the advent of mobile devices, such as cell phones and tablets, searching to find information as and when needed is at our fingertips.
A little history
The most used search engine today is, of course, Google. Google changed the way search engines worked, using high-end algorithms. The first years of the internet, or World Wide Web as it was predominantly known as then, saw the rise of pre-Google search engines such as Alta Vista, Info Seek, Lycos and WebCrawler. These are sadly no more. Yahoo was the major player in 1994, and it is now the power behind Microsoft’s Bing.
As said, Google changed the game as more and more users were taking to the web. Back then, it was not all about PCs and Macs. In the mix were still the Amiga, Atari, and Sun Microsystems.
It became a hard-fought race to gain dominance in the search engine market. Google realized the potential of the search engine and the fact that everyone who used the internet for a business wanted to be on the first page. Google now accounts for 70% of all searches carried out and has over 50 internet products and services.
Searching for specifics
There are thousands if not millions of results when searching for a product and service, refining that down can be hard. A search on Google for ‘conductor’ results in over two billion results ranging from orchestra conductors to semiconductors to bus conductors.
Enter the specific search engine. A specific search engine is looking only at one type of item. If the item wanted is an electrical conductor, then a search on Octopart would find only electrical. conductors. If searching for a specific rare book, VivaLibra is the one to use.
Down to the money
Alphabet, Google’s parent company, announced its fourth-quarter results for 2021 as $75.3 billion. It does not stop there. The SEO (Search Engine Optimization) industry came about in the mid-1990s as the need to get your website up there in front of your potential clients became paramount. SEO today is very big business and has developed to become one of the top 10 priorities for any business, charity, blogger, or political party.
Into the future
The internet businesses move forward at a very fast pace. The algorithms used by the major search engines and the optimization of the SEO companies are always fine-tuned.
Google already uses A.I. (Artificial Intelligence) and is expected to take that further with the patent of ‘Methods, Systems, and Media for Presenting Content Organized by Category.’
No one says to use a search engine; ‘Google it’ is the expression. A company knows it has made it when its company name becomes synonymous with the product, such as Hoover or Coke. Google isn’t going anywhere and will be leading the way for search engines for a long time to come. It has a long future.
