TOP 5 SEARCH ENGINES

Google Inc is a multinational corporation that is active in technologies for internet searching, cloud computing, and advertising. The company provides hosting and development for internet-based services and products; most of its revenues stem from advertising that occurs through Google’s AdWords and AdSense programs. The domain name for Google was registered on 15 September 1997 and Google was incorporated as a privately held company on 4 September 1998. The initial public offering was on 19 August 2004. From its inception, the stated mission of the company was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” Google has been based in Mountain View, California since 2006.

Over one million servers in data centers worldwide are operated by Google. More than one billion search requests and some twenty-four petabytes (24 thousand terabytes) of user-generated data are processed daily. The company’s booming expansion since it was incorporated has generated numerous acquisitions, partnerships, and products aside from the company’s core search engine. Google provides a range of online productivity products, e.g. Gmail software, and social-networking tools. Google also makes products with various applications that focus on the desktop as well, such as the Google Chrome web browser; Picasa photo organizing and editing software; and Google Talk instant messaging application. Google is acknowledged for breaking ground with its Android mobile phone operating system, which is used in phones like the Nexus One and Motorola Droid. Google.com is the most frequently visited website on the internet, and many other international Google sites (e.g. google.co.in, google.co.uk.) are among the one hundred most often viewed, as are other Google-owned sites such as Blogger, and Orkut Youtube.

Google began in January 1996 as a research project by Sergey Brin and Larry Page – nicknamed the Google Guys – when they were PhD candidates attending Stanford University, California. The two theorized about improving internet search systems. Existing conventional search engines operated by counting the number of times a given term appeared on the page. 
A comparable approach had been applied to web searches and page ranking since 1996 by RankDex, a small search engine designed by Robin Li from IDD Information Services. Li would go on to found Baidu in China to patent and use the RankDex technology.

The duo designed a new type of engine: one that would produce results by analyzing the relationships that exist between websites. Brin and Page named the new technology PageRank. Now the relevance of a website was measured by the number of pages that linked back to the original site, and by the significance of those pages.

The men nicknamed their new search engine “BackRub” at first, because it used backlinks to gauge a site’s importance. They eventually changed its name to Google – a misspelling of googol, a one followed by one hundred zeros – to indicate how much information their search engine could handle.

Google first ran under the domain google.stanford.edu, using the Stanford University website. The company’s first headquarters was the garage of a friend (Susan Wojcicki) in Menlo Park, California. The company’s first employee was Craig Silverstein, a fellow PhD student at Stanford.

Bing (formerly known as Live Search, Windows Live Search, and MSN Search) is a web search engine from Microsoft. Some of its most important new features are that Bing shows search suggestions as the user enters queries, as well as a list of related searches (called the Explorer pane) based on semantic technology from Powerset that Microsoft purchased in 2008.

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled Bing at the All Things Digital conference in San Diego, California on 28 May 2009. The service was released in a preview version on June 1, 2009, and went online on 3 June 2009. Microsoft and Yahoo! announced on 29 July 2009 that Bing would power the Yahoo! Search website.

Yahoo! Inc is an American public corporation that is based in Sunnyvale (in Silicon Valley), California, which provides internet services around the world. The best known services are probably its web portal, Yahoo! Search (search engine), Yahoo! Directory, Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Maps (online mapping), Yahoo! Video (video sharing), advertising, and diverse social-media websites and related services.

Yahoo! was founded by David Filo and Jerry Yang in January 1994. The company was incorporated on March 1, 1995. Carol Bartz, former executive chair of Autodesk, was appointed the new chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors on 13 January 2009.

Company founders David Filo and Jerry Yang were electrical engineering graduate students at Stanford University in January 1994 when they created a website named David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web. This website was a directory of other web sites classified by a certain hierarchy, instead of a searchable index of pages. David and Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed Yahoo! in April 1994, and the yahoo.com domain was created on 18 January 1995.

The company boomed throughout the 1990s, diversifing into a web portal like many other search engines and web directories. Yahoo! also made many high-profile acquisitions. During the dot-com bubble its stock price skyrocketed, closing at an all-time high of US$118.75 on 3 January 2000 – and dropping to an all-time low ofUS$8.11 after the dot-com bubble burst.

Yahoo! first used Google for web searches in 2000. The company then started developing its own search technologies and introduced them in 2004. Yahoo!’s own mail service was overhauled, and started competing with Google’s Gmail in 2007.

Microsoft Corp made an unsolicited bid to acquire Yahoo! for US$44.6 billion in February 2008. Yahoo! formally rejected the bid, stating that the bid “substantially undervalues” Yahoo! and did not serve the interest of its shareholders.

Baidu, Inc is a Chinese-language search engine for websites, audio files, and images. Baidu was created in 2000 by Robin Li and Eric Xu and incorporated on 18 January 2000. Both founders are Chinese nationals who studied and worked abroad before returning to China.

Baidu provides 57 search and community products and services, such as Baidu Baike, a collaborative online encyclopedia, and a searchable keyword-based discussion forum. The index covers over 740 million web pages, 80 million images, and 10 million multimedia files. Baidu also provides multi-media content, such as MP3 music and films, and is the first web service in China to offer WAP and PDA-based mobile searches.

Baidu.com, Inc is registered in the Cayman Islands. In December 2007, Baidu became the first Chinese company ever to be included in the NASDAQ-100 index; in April 2010, Alexa Internet, Inc rated Baidu 7th overall in Alexa’s internet rankings.

Ask (formerly Ask Jeeves; still known as Ask Jeeves in the United Kingdom) is a search engine created by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen in Berkeley, California in 1996. Gary Chevsky designed and implemented the original search engine software, and this was the core around which Warthen, Chevsky, Justin Grant, and others built the early AskJeeves.com website. Ask.com is based in Oakland, California.

The name Ask Jeeves referred to Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional “gentleman’s personal gentleman,” or valet, in the works of P G Wodehouse. On AskJeeves.com the Jeeves character served as the user’s valet, fetching answers to any question asked.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was that users should be able to obtain answers to questions they posed in everyday, natural language, while the search engine also enabled conventional searching by keywords. The original approach is still supported by Ask.com, with further support for math, dictionary, and unit-conversion queries.

Plans to phase out Jeeves were made public in 2005. On 27 February 2006, the valet character vanished from Ask.com to statements that he was “going into retirement.” In 2009 the uk.ask.com website resuscitated the character prominently. To American users the new Jeeves is still visible as a skin, or background image, on the uk.ask.com URL.

Ask.com belongs to InterActive Corp, which owns various sites such as Ask Kids,Teoma (now ExpertRank), and country-specific sites for Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom.