What is a search engine?

One,The Role of Search Engines

As one of the crucial applications in today's Internet, search engines play an important role in several ways. The next section will look at theInformation source, information audience, SEO industryThese 3 perspectives are presented.

1. Sources of information

The source of information is the organization, institution, enterprise or individual that provides the information. In the Internet era, search engines play an important role in information dissemination. It can not only help the provider of information to realize targeted dissemination, but also be able to continuously and effectively track the audience of information, so as to efficiently control the entire dissemination process.

For example, a photography studio to attract users who want to take wedding photos, through the search engine, the photography studio can be accurately located to this target group, such as recent searches for "wedding photos", "travel photography" users are likely to be considering shooting the The user who has recently searched for "wedding photos" and "travel photography" is likely to be a user who is considering taking wedding photos. Using the data provided by the search engine, it is possible to monitor and analyze the user's search behavior, and further optimize the organization and dissemination of information, so as to more effectively convey the information to the target audience.

2. Audience for information

The information audience refers to a wide range of Internet users who often rely on search engines as an important tool in accessing information on the Web. Search engines, with their fast and convenient features, can help users quickly find the information they need.

If there is no search engine, when the user needs to find an article about "the beautiful scenery of Yunnan", he needs to enter the URLs of various travel websites one by one, and then spend a lot of time and energy to browse and search one by one. Therefore, with a search engine, users can easily find hundreds or thousands of related web pages in a short period of time.

3.SEO Industry

The SEO industry is committed to helping information providers more flexibly utilize search engines for information dissemination, thus helping the majority of Internet users to more efficiently access useful information resources. In this digital era, search engines have become the cornerstone of information dissemination. Therefore, as SEO practitioners, it is particularly important to understand and make good use of the rules of search engines.

Two,Development of search engines

Understanding the development of search engines is crucial for SEO practitioners, not only does it help them understand the history and current state of search engines, but it also helps them to more accurately predict future trends. The following will provide a brief overview of the history of search engines.

1. The beginnings of a search engine

Archie, born in 1990, is regarded as the prototype of search engine. At that time there was no HTTP (HyperTextTransfer Protocol, HyperText Transfer Protocol) based Web pages, Archie is only suitable for retrieving files on FTP (File TransferProtocol) servers. However, it was this early search tool that laid the foundation for the later development of search citation.

2. The first generation of search engines: the era of classified directories

In the era of categorized directories, search engines would collect information such as site names, URLs, and content summaries of websites on the Internet, and then organize them into categories to form categorized directories on a website. Through these categorized directories, users can browse step by step to find websites related to their needs. Famous categorized directory sites include Sohu Directory and hao123.

3. The second generation of search engines: the era of text retrieval

In the era of text retrieval, search engines operate on the query information entered by the user in order to determine the degree of relevance of the query information to the content of the target web page and return the web page with a higher degree of relevance to the user. In this era, Alta Vista, Excite and other search engines are representatives of this field.

4. Third Generation Search Engine: Integrated Analysis Era

In the era of integrated analytics, search engines determine the popularity and importance of a website by analyzing the number of external links (i.e., the number of links from other websites pointing to the website). This is because when other websites actively refer to a website, it means that the website has a certain degree of popularity and value. However, the number of links alone cannot fully measure the quality of a website, so search engines also use the importance of the content of the page and the degree of similarity as a supplementary indicator. By taking these factors into account, search engines can more accurately determine the relevance and value of a website. Finally, search engines will intelligently integrate the massive amount of feedback and present it as a page with a portal form, instead of returning an uncategorized list of links as in the text search era.

5. Fourth generation search engine: user-centered era

The so-called user-centered, that is, when the user query, for different users to provide different query content. For example, when the keyword "apple" is entered, the needs of office workers and fruit farmers for this keyword are obviously different. Even for the same user, due to the different time and occasion, their needs will be different. Therefore, all the mainstream search engines are trying to solve a problem - how to accurately determine the user's real needs through the short keywords entered by the user.

In order to solve this problem, search engines must have a deep understanding of users. With the development of the mobile Internet, search engines on mobile smart devices can build user profiles through multiple characteristics such as users' search behavior on mobile devices, time spent on the Internet, operating habits, and search content. This can help search engines more accurately understand the needs of users, so as to provide them with more personalized and accurate search results.

So the question comes, some netizens will ask, the sixth generation of search engines is whether the AI artificial intelligence-led search engine era, such as through the AI search engine intelligence analyzes the user's true intentions so as to show the relevant content. Welcome to the comments below to leave a message, together to explore the sixth generation of search engine era characteristics.