A search engine is a mechanism used to find information on the world wide web. These automated tools utilise very in-depth algorithms to decide what online content is applicable for a specific search query. The algorithms delve further in to “respectability” of the content via various channels to ascertain which of the applicable content is more important than the rest and thus how to rank the results.

The earliest search engines started showing their heads in the early 90’s, yet these where extremely simple when compared to our modern day examples. As the sheer volume of online content increase the search engines where faced with an ever increasing task of detecting, analysing and arranging masses of data and the modern search engine was born.

Now days, in the South African setting as well as across the majority of the globe, Google is the dominant search engine, with estimates of about 85% of the market share, the closest rival, Yahoo! coming in at 6%, followed by the Chinese search engine Baidu and Bing at 3%. In the context of American searches the values are slightly different with Google at 74%, Yahoo! at 17% and Bing at 9%. Of course there are a multitude of other options which are listed below.

Most modern search engines use the same mechanisms, a robot or spider that trawls the web following links and capturing data, an index where the found content is stored for later retrieval and the search algorithm that ranks the results.