A Review Paper on Various Search Engines (Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Bing)

Abstract

Search engines are used in the web as a tool for information retrieval. As the web is a huge repository of heterogeneous and unstructured data so to filter out relevant information from unnecessary ones search engines are needed. Search engines usually consists of crawling module, page repository, indexing module, querying module and ranking module. The inter communication between these modules describes the working methodology of a search engine. This paper aims to focus on the comparative analysis of five major search engines i.e Google, Yahoo, Altavista, Ask and Bing in a tabular form based on some features. The features include search operator, search web, search images, search videos, search news, search maps, search books, advance search, change background, change search settings, display number of results, shopping, translation services, multi-language support, questions/answers, directory, advertising programs, business services, themes, case sensitive, finance, safe search, search pad, career and preferences. Google stands out as the best search engine amongst all search engines, which works on Page Rank algorithm. Page Rank is a numeric value which determines the importance of a web page by calculating the number of backlinks.