Web search engine#
A web search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a line of results, often referred to as search engine results pages (SERPs). The information may be a mix of links to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, research papers, and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories. Unlike web directories, which are maintained only by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Any internet-based content that can’t be indexed and searched by a web search engine falls under the category of deep web.
Read more on Wikipedia.
Examples#
- Bing (For-profit, own index)
- Brave Search (For-profit, own index)
- DuckDuckGo (For-profit; uses Bing’s index)
- Ecosia (Non-profit, uses Bing’s index)
- Google (For-profit, own index)
- mwmbl (Non-profit, own index, open source)
- searx (Metasearch engine, open source)
- SearXNG (Metasearch engine, open source) ⭐
- Startpage (For-profit, uses Google’s index)
- YaCy (Peer-to-peer / decentralized, shared index, open source)