What are the Top 5 Search Engines?

According to the Alexa.com, the most popular website that monitors and analyzes the

attendance of all registered sites on the Internet, this is the list of the five most popular search

engines today:

Google

Yahoo

Bing

Ask

DuckDuckGo

It is very important to note that this order largely depends on the user’s geographic location, so in China, the most populated country in the world, Baidu takes 1st place, while Yandex is the most popular search engine in Russia.

Globally, Google is undoubtedly dominant search engine in the last 16 years. It is less known fact that major invention which enabled this domination as well as such fast growth is PageRank. Before Google showed up, competitive search engines such as Yahoo, Altavista, Lycos, Infoseek and others distributed websites by category or by keyword count on the page.

PageRank, named after Larry Page – one of the Google co-founders, basically operates by measuring the number of links that leads to a particular site or a page from other websites. On the basis of this idea is the so-called link popularity.

Simply said, if, for a certain term, a site has multiple incoming (inbound) links, that site receives a higher PageRank compared to others with similar topic. However, it is very important that incoming websites have some kind of “authority” i.e. they are also relevant to a particular topic. Otherwise, there would be a large number of copy/paste sites with the same or very similar content and links to a site that needs to be promoted.

Translated into practical example, PageRank works as some kind of a recommendation. If you ask 10 friends for the best restaurant in town, and 8 of them recommends the same place, you will probably go there for a lunch. On the other hand, if you have a headache, advice from a medic on which medicine you should take is worth more than advice from 10 randomly selected people.

PageRank is not the only algorithm Google uses to show search results, but it is certainly the first and also the most famous. Although PageRank is one of the most important factors that influence the higher search engine rank, it is just one of the 200 remaining factors that Google takes into account while ranking a particular page.

Google Algorithm adapts daily in order to deliver the most relevant information to the visitor. During 2010 the Google Search Algorithm changed incredible 516 times, almost 1.5 change in a day! Since May 2015, following additional changes to adapt Google’s mobile friendly technology, one thing is certain: If we want to reach our clients and make our website to be promoted by PageRank we need proper SEO management.