Search engine
 Search engine  (computation technology)   | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Search engines are websites that record and index webpages in order to handle user searches, presenting a list of them to users who input a search term. |
Search engines for the World Wide Web have increasingly attracted the interest of those interested in manipulating public opinion, particularly since about 2000. Censorship of search engines is harder to detect than social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter.
History
Google, funded by the NSA was an early and high popular search engine. It originally avoided "sponsored results" (advertisers who bought their way to the top of the rankings) and did little advertising, but focused on providing good search results. As of 2018, it remains the most popular search engine.
"Bias"
Search engines inevitably prioritise certain pages over others - i.e. put them nearer the top. Some search engines may publish a few details of their ranking algorithms, but for almost all the exact details are a closely guarded commercial secret. One exception is Gigablast, a small search engine which publishes its source code on Github.
Subject-specific Blocking
Some search engines carry out subject-specific blocking of certain domains - not returning results from a particular domain in response to particular search terms. This is a form of internet censorship which might be motivated by a variety of situations (e.g. copyright infringement or other such legal issues) but could also be used to try to prevent public access to specific information.
As of January 2018, neither Google, Ask.com nor StartPage returned any hits in the top 100 from the ISGP site for the search term "Dutroux Affair" (without quotes).StartPage only had 81 hits and Ask.com had only 40.[1][2] only the top #100 were searched on Google. This is interesting since Yahoo[3], Bing[4], DuckDuckGo[5], Yandex[6], Ecosia,[7] and Gigablast[8] all returned the ISGP page of this name amongst their top 10 hits.
Examples
| Page name | Start | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Ask.com | 1996 | One of the earliest search engines. |
| Baidu | 1 January 2000 | The Chinese #1 search engine |
| Bing | 3 June 2009 | The Microsoft search engine |
| Dogpile | 1996 | Alternative search engine |
| DuckDuckGo | A search engine that claims not to track its users, and which does not appear to be censoring this site as much as Google | |
| Ecosia | 2009 | "Green" search engine |
| Gigablast | 2002 | An open source search engine written in over 500,00o lines of C/C++. In 2019, Martin Wells warned against using the code. |
| Global Internet/Skynet conglomerate | ||
| MetaGer | A metasearch engine focused on protecting users privacy | |
| Mojeek | 2004 | Independent alternative search engine |
| Naver | 1999 | South Korean search engine |
| Presearch | 2017 | Decentralized search engine that takes in community feedback in it's development. |
| Qwant | 2013 | A French-based search engine with its own indexing engine. It claims that it does not employ user tracking or personalize search results in order to avoid trapping users in a filter bubble. |
| SearXNG | An open community metasearch engine, aggregating the results of other search engines while not storing information about its users. | |
| Searx | 2014 | An open source decentralised search engine |
| StartPage | 1998 | Search engine in cooperation with Linux Mint |
| Swisscows | 2014 | Search engine which claims not keep track of the searches carried out on its site. Does however use Microsoft Bing for web search. |
| Webcrawler.com | Meta search engine | |
| Yacy | 2003 | An open source decentralised web crawler |
| Yahoo! | January 1994 | Old search engine and web company |
| Yandex | Russian version of Google, multilingual search engine |
