The best search engine on the internet, for us Italians, is Google and the article could end here becoming the shortest post in history. To avoid being trivial, let's take a moment to see the differences between the main search engines on the internet which are 4 and which are used to find answers from 99% of web surfers around the world.
Several years ago, the sites to search for information on the internet were different then, like many sectors of the economy, the larger ones ate the smaller ones and absorbed them making them disappear.
Yahoo! it is the oldest one born from the work of two American students who began to catalog the few sites by hand in those years and we talk about the year 1994/95.
Google, on the other hand, was born later with a faster and less tiring type of program in which the scanning and cataloging takes place thanks to an automatic spider able to put the web pages in order according to some criteria that are still very secret.
Microsoft, rich and powerful, could not stay out of this information market and for years has been trying to improve its search engine, Live Search which today is called Bing and which owes most of its use to the mere fact which on a new Windows operating system is set as the default search engine by default. Today Bing provides search results to Yahoo and has practically absorbed it.
Finally, the fourth, the least known and today in sharp decline is Ask (that of the odious Ask Toolbar).
All other search sites base their searches on one of the 4 above; so, for example, Virgil's results are those of Bing, Ecosia instead uses Google's results.
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Without turning around too much, the difference in the results between Google and Bing lies above all in the actuality of the web pages shown that answer the question asked by users in the search field. By actuality we mean the date of creation of that page and, therefore, the fact that it is more or less new.
For example you could search on all 4 engines for something like "convert video", very popular that is always updated with new guides and something like "format a pc" which is a topic that is less and less talked about because it is not something that presents frequent news.
The results therefore for the popular key are roughly the same even if they have a different order while, for the second example, there are rather different results between Google and the others. Google is faster than its competitors to receive new pages in its index and therefore to update the lists, the results therefore present sites that are sometimes less known because they are newer than others.
Yahoo and Bing, on the other hand, are slower and link their results to more mature websites, those that have existed for the longest time and are considered more authoritative and truthful. Google beats others not only because it brings out more updated answers but also because it manages to make a more dynamic analysis of words, therefore considering the fact that, returning to the example, converting is like saying converter or conversion. Certainly it is not always possible to distinguish these nuances between words but for very popular topics we say that it succeeds.
Google expands the results page by adding, in addition to sponsored results, those that come from Google News and, sometimes, those from YouTube videos and blog searches.
Google is the only one that actually presents separate search engines depending on the country in which it is located even if Bing today has adapted to the location and has different results depending on the language.
The fact that Google is currently the best of the search engines does not mean that it is excellent.
The problem of the information monopoly for which, on the internet, a site and what is inside it exists, only if it can be found on Google is seriously felt by webmasters and bloggers. So if Google decides to delete a result from its index, it disappears completely from the panorama of findable information and its voice, perhaps inconvenient to someone, even if it exists, would be invisible. There are thus a multitude of invisible and submerged sites on the web that are almost impossible to find. At the same time, poor results from sites optimized for Google but which do not have significant information and answers are often found in the first Google search results.
In the last year, to improve internet search, some original and alternative search engines have been born that have a moderate success especially in the United States.
They are: Qwant (European Union project to counter Google) and then iXQuick and DuckDuckGo, alternatives to Google with private searches that allow you to clean up the results of garbage and unwanted sites.
Blekko is strong for the ability to create slashtags and for SEO searches.
DuckDuckGo was taken as an example by Google to insert the "Block this site from appearing in searches" button.
A change of course is taking place in recent years with the advent of social networks including Facebook but, above all Twitter, which we talked about in another post, which looks like a megaphone to spread flash news and comments in real time.
Nothing new, therefore, on the horizon on the western front, at least for us Italians where intelligent research tools such as Wolram Alpha that answers questions are not usable.
