Search engine

A web search engine is a software system that finds web pages that match a web search. It searches 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 hyperlinks to web pages, images, videos, infographics, articles, and other types of files. As of January 2022, Google is by far the world's most used search engine, with a market share of 90.6%, and the world's other most used search engines were Bing, Yahoo!, Baidu, Yandex, and DuckDuckGo.

This article is about searching the World Wide Web. For other uses, see Search engine (disambiguation).

Unlike web directories and social bookmarking sites, which are maintained by human editors, search engines also maintain real-time information by running an algorithm on a web crawler. Modern search engines are based on techniques and methods developed in the field of Information retrieval. Some search engines also mine data available in databases or open directories.

Internet-based content that cannot be indexed and searched by a web search engine falls under the category of deep web.

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