Search engine
A search engine retrieves information on the Internet for users. Typically a user types in key words and the search engine will display a list of links containing those terms. The search engine may list links based on algorithms designed to give priority to relevancy, or popularity, or fees paid by sites to the search engine company. Generally the methods used by search engines are proprietary and not completely known.
AltaVista was a popular early search engine in 1995, but its slow speed caused it to lose out to Google, which would retrieve information almost instantaneously based on presorted techniques.
In the December 2008 Nielsen Online rankings, Google had over 62% of the search traffic on the Internet, and Yahoo! is a distant second. Google, Yahoo and AOL all showed good year-on-year growth, with Microsoft's MSN/Live Search being the biggest loser.[1] Other new search engines have been developed as well, such as Microsoft's Bing, and another site called Duck Duck Go, each with an aim to compete against the other larger, more well-known information retrieval sites.