Popular search engines. Search engines in Russia: what else is there besides Yandex and Google

Most recently, Google complied with the requirement of the Federal Antimonopoly Service of the Russian Federation - it provided Android users with a choice of search engine in the standard Chrome browser. Now, after installing the latest version or using a special settings menu, everyone can choose how to search for information on the Internet: Yandex, Google and Mail.Ru. Which one is better? Let's take a closer look.

Without moving on to the search itself, let’s evaluate home page convenience"The Magnificent Three" Let's start with Google:

The traditionally ascetic Google home page contains only a line in the center where you can enter your query. To get to the rest of the company’s services, you need to click the button with the grid. From there you can read news, go to mail or maps. If you want more on the main page, then you need to install either the main one for Android and iOS. There, all services mixed with a search bar are immediately displayed on the main screen.

Yandex did not skimp on the functionality of the main page in the mobile version. The site is literally crammed with all possible services from the Russian company, and upon entering it immediately asks for access to the location. If allowed, the main page will immediately show a block with a cafe near you, and also adapt the Yandex.Traffic widget. I know many people who use Yandex solely because of its convenient home page. It is described as some kind of store where you go for one thing, but forget about it, and at the exit you have a cart full of various goods, except for that very one.

If Google's home page is ascetic, then Mail.Ru's is simply the height of minimalism. In the bad sense of the word, since there are no information cards, interactive elements, etc. on it. If we select news in the menu, the site will kindly offer us to “search for news” in 2017. I think this is where we can finish the review of the main Mail.

We carry out further testing on two parameters: locality and convenience. Read more about each parameter in the corresponding subheadings.

Locality

This parameter determines the extent to which a particular search engine is optimized for the needs of users in the CIS region, in particular from Russia. For a more visual demonstration, many search queries were related to the provincial city of Bryansk.

First, let's look at how three search engines understand local colorful words and the context of their use. For example, the name of the city of Chelyabinsk is often abbreviated as “person”. What if you enter the query “person routes”:

Google and Yandex understood what I wanted from them, but Mail didn’t.

How well do the three search engines know the great and mighty Russian language? Let's ask them for help in resolving a popular error - theirs or theirs:

Google responds to such a request with a brief help from a third-party site, explaining that the first option makes the speech rude and low. “Search No. 1 in Russia” even when entering a query shows the correct answer, but when you go to the search engine, no help is given - we’ll take your word for it. But Mail.Ru did neither one nor the other - it simply gave Gramota.ru as the first result. It could have been worse.

Let's throw in the tricky query “Europe time” to the search. It is implied that we will see the opening hours of the large shopping center "Europe". Let's see what they show us:

Quite expectedly, the more global Google produced a table of time zones in major European cities. But Yandex, in the second block, figured out to show information about the shopping center along with opening hours. The second Russian search engine disappointed with the lack of both.

Now let's move on to a purely local story - to a search with location included. Let's try to find us a place where we can have lunch:

It’s funny, but only Google managed to understand us, although the first result was an analysis of the word “lunch” itself. Immediately in second place was a map with a list of local establishments. For some reason, Yandex decided to teach us how to spell a word, just like Mail.

How about ordering some pizza?

This time, Google also showed its best side - a map with pizzerias was in first place in the search results. Yandex organized its search results a little worse: first there is a block with advertising, then photos of pizza and the concept, and only then the place where you can order the coveted pizza. But in Mail.Ru, not everything is so bad - the search returned delivery services with a dial button.

What if you look for pizza in another city?

Nothing has changed in the search for a good corporation, but Yandex has improved. It’s just a pity that the engine’s “thinking” needs to be pushed by the name of the city.

To sum up the locality parameter, we can say that Yandex often has a more modern database of organizations. For example, when searching for a cafe, Google showed me an eatery that has not existed for a couple of years - “Rise”. Yandex removed it a long time ago. In 2GIS, which is used by Mail.Ru search, this cafe also no longer exists.

The same situation is with bank branches and other points on the map. For example, Google has no information about the branch of Eastern Express Bank, which a year ago belonged to another bank.

Moreover, on Google, even on the map, branches of this no longer existing bank “Uniastrum” are marked. In Yandex and Mail.Ru the maps are more up-to-date. In the end: Yandex is more “localized” and has an up-to-date information base in the Russian Federation and CIS countries; Google is a little worse in this regard, but you can use it; Mail.Ru is in last place.

Convenience

Convenience refers to the ability of a search engine to quickly provide the necessary information for trivial queries. For example, some kind of chart, company information card or built-in services for ordering some services.

Let's start with the trivial - we'll ask you to display the weekend schedule in June:

Yandex showed a complete list of weekends for 2017, except for standard Saturdays and Sundays. Google limited itself to links to sites, but Mail.Ru was a little surprising - it showed a calendar with marked weekends.

Let's compare information cards for objects like computer games, for example, the old Gothic, which came out at the beginning of the 2000s:

In all three search engines the description is completely different, but in Google the card is the most meager - only a link to Wikipedia indicating the developer and series. The most popular search engine in Russia provided a rating on Metacritic, as well as more detailed information from Wikipedia. Mail.Ru, in addition to the usual description, also provides links to descriptions of the games in the series, the engine, the role-playing system and other features - very good.

Let's move on to one of the most popular functions - calculations:

There's a lot to talk about here. In Google search, when you enter some kind of mathematical query, a small calculator with the calculated expression is shown. In addition to receiving the result, the user gets the opportunity to continue calculations or solve some other problem - very convenient. In Yandex, the approach is different, and in many ways more convenient. When you enter a query in a line, the system immediately understands it, writes it mathematically and displays the result - you don’t even need to go to the search itself. Mail.Ru traditionally disappointed with links to its own “Answers”.

Let's look at how unit converters work. Let's set a not-so-simple conversion option - micrometers to meters:

The Google conversion widget shows the number of meters in one micrometer as a formula in the format 10 to the minus X power. The “Search No. 1 in Russia” widget is more understandable - in it you can set the number of micrometers and get the usual number with zeros after the decimal point. Mail again refuses to convert and count.

Let's try another function with a verbal trick in action. Let’s enter the query “anthill calories”. It is clear that we are talking about a cake called anthill and its calorie content:

The “good corporation” search engine correctly recognized our request and showed the calorie content of the cake in the form of a table with proteins, fats and carbohydrates. But Yandex returned only a single calorie content indicator, but in the next request it showed a link with a convenient snippet that lists all the ingredients of the cake. Mail.Ru limited itself to links.

Let's try to order a taxi directly through the search. Let’s enter a request for Moscow, since we can’t count on advanced functionality for the regions:

In all three search engines, the first results are occupied by advertising, but if you scroll down, then in the case of Google you will find a regular widget with a map and a list of taxi services, where you can immediately call and order a car. Yandex has a unique feature - ordering through its own taxi service without calling - just fill in the necessary data in the form. Mail's functionality is identical to Google's. For residents of Moscow, there is also a nice feature in the Russian search engine - you can make an appointment with a doctor using EMIAS (Unified Medical Information and Analytical System of the City of Moscow):

What about convenient “tricks” for reading articles and news? Google has a popular and convenient AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) system.

It is the optimization of a news site for mobile devices. The pages are simplified, becoming much lighter and easier to read.

Yandex has its own analogue of AMP - turbo mode, but it does not work on all news sites. Moreover, it is mainly tailored for Wikipedia and other information sites. In turbo mode, the site loads quickly and the page is lightweight.

Let's move a little away from text search and compare image search. On the mobile version of the site in Google, image search is quite meager - you can only enter a query, and also rank the results by date or select only GIF animations. Almost the same functionality awaits us in Mail.

Yandex is better. Firstly, every day they show a beautiful picture that you can put, for example, on your desktop. Secondly, it is possible to upload a picture and search by its content. It could even be an image that has never been on the Internet. You can also recognize text in a photo, find a car model or product.

It's time to let you down result"Convenience" section. In almost every way, Mail.Ru search loses to two competitors. Yandex often takes advantage of slightly more convenient services. It feels like all the functions that we looked at were improved a little better in Yandex, but they also work quite well in Google. For convenience, Google and Yandex can be placed in the same place.

Who's the best?

What do we end up with? We can immediately say that the Mail.Ru search engine is of little use. Although the company’s programmers have developed their own engine and have been using it for several years, even a free one can be placed above this domestic development. When comparing Google and Yandex, you need to take into account that the latter greatly optimizes its services and search results for residents of Russia and other CIS countries. Most likely, this is why many ardent geeks and Google fans do not like Yandex. However, for the average user this is the best solution where you can find any information and even order some services.

If you don’t need convenient services, additional “gimmicks” and other goodies, then your choice is Google, or even better, DuckDuckGo. But it’s not offered to Russian residents in the Chrome search selection window.

Most of the time a user spends on the Internet is spent searching for information that interests him. At the same time, there are many ways to obtain this data - you can look into an online encyclopedia and try to find the answer there, you can subscribe to a newsletter on a topic of interest and carefully study incoming correspondence, or you can consult with competent people on the forum by asking them a question. But the most universal way to find something on the Internet is to use one of the many search engines. Services for searching millions and millions of websites are, perhaps, the fundamental link of the World Wide Web. Without Google, Yahoo, Yandex and many other search engines familiar today, a user’s stay on the Internet would be more like a blind man walking through the forest. The importance of search engines for working on the Internet can hardly be overestimated - many users have search engine addresses as their starting pages, and it is from there that for many people an endless journey through various network resources begins. However, the effectiveness of Internet excavations is different for everyone - one person finds information instantly, another takes a lot of time, and a third may not find anything useful for himself at all. What is the reason? The answer is simple: searching on the Internet is akin to fishing - you need to know where to fish and what to fish for, i.e. where to look and how to look. In today's article we will talk about the best way to search on the Internet, and tell you what search engines exist for this, besides those that are “on everyone’s lips.”

However, we will start with those systems that you know. If a user knows the address of a search engine, this does not mean that he knows how to use it. Let's check how well you understand search query technology. How accurate the results you will get, first of all, depends on how skillfully you formed the search query. For example, if you are looking for information to write a term paper, you do not need to enter its topic verbatim, especially if the work has a narrow specialization. You will find much more valuable information if you try to select keywords, that is, those words that will definitely appear in your work. If you are looking for a lost manual for a car radio, then by entering the model number, you will probably get a huge number of sites offering to purchase it. To weed out unnecessary links, you can use the search function in the found or exclude some words from the search. In almost every search engine you will find an advanced search function. This is another good way to filter out unnecessary results. Such functions may include searching for pages that have been recently updated, searching for pages only in a certain language, or on sites located in the domain zone you specify. The time spent searching can be significantly saved if you know and use the query language syntax. Each search engine has its own characteristics. For example, when you are looking for something on Yandex, it would be a good idea to use the following techniques:

To search for words that should appear on the page in one sentence, put the & symbol between them
To exclude a specific word from search results, add it to your query by prefixing it with ~~
To find pages that contain at least one of the words specified in the search query, separate them with |
To search for a word in the specified form, put an exclamation mark in front of it

The Google search engine also has its secrets. Here are just a few of them:

To search for information on a specific site (and only on it), enter its address in the query field, preceded by the word site and a colon (for example, site:http://www.site)
To search for a phrase that should appear on the page in its entirety, put it in quotation marks
To exclude pages that contain a specific word from search results, add it to your query by preceding it with a minus sign

These are just a few touches that can help make your Internet search more efficient. If you want to achieve optimal results, we advise you to become more familiar with the syntax of the query language, which is described in detail in the help system of your favorite search engine. There is no doubt that Google and Yandex are indispensable tools for searching the Internet - search in these systems is convenient, flexible and very accurate. But, nevertheless, this does not mean that alternative search engines do not have the right to exist. Yes - they index fewer pages, yes - their methods for selecting resources are largely controversial. But such search engines have one undeniable advantage - they offer something new, different from accepted standards. Since alternative search services use a different approach to selecting resources that match the query, the search result will be completely different than in the case of conventional search engines. So, if long searches on well-known services did not lead to anything, this means one thing - you need to change tactics and try other methods of searching for information using alternative search engines. Often, alternative search engines use one or more lists of resources that have been found by Google, Yahoo and other major systems to collect results. These results are filtered, the best are selected and often visualized for better understanding using a diagram, site map, tag cloud, etc. Developers of alternative search engines sometimes go so far in their search for a new universal interface that it is sometimes difficult to recognize a search engine in a web page. And yet, these are search engines. Unusual and strange, at first glance...

FindSounds.com - searches for sounds

This resource is intended for those users who are in creative search. The resource allows you to search for sound files of different formats - wav, mp3, aiff, au. The resource database contains a wide variety of sounds - animal screams, grinding cars, ringing, knocking, sirens, buzzing insects, the roar of explosions and gunfire, splashing water, etc. Sound files can be searched by various criteria, for example, by size, the presence of two or one sound channels (stereo/mono), sampling frequency and sound bit depth. In the search results, the resource shows not only links to the found files, but also their main characteristics, and also shows a graph of the sound amplitude, which can be used to judge the nature of the sound of a given sample.

The FindSounds sound effects database can be used in a variety of areas - from the development of computer games and other applications, to the creation of presentations and all kinds of clips. The search engine can be useful, for example, for those who create interactive web graphics and want to add variety to the site by accompanying the clicking of page navigation elements with different sounds.

Gnod.net - will select music, books and films to suit your taste

When a person has a desire to read a new book, listen to some new music or watch a movie, he usually turns to his friend or acquaintance for advice, who has authority in his eyes. However, finding someone who would agree to express their opinion on this issue is not so easy. Firstly, not everyone likes to give advice, because when recommending something to another, a person takes on a share of responsibility, and many are stopped by the question “What if he doesn’t like the film that I recommend?” Secondly, the person who gives advice must understand what exactly the interlocutor will like, and what will be completely uninteresting. After all, taste and color, as they say... But there is an easier way to get good advice - use a special search engine that is made specifically for this purpose. So, you want to listen to a new band, but you don’t have the time or desire to look for good music. The gnod.net resource will ask you for several names of musical artists that you like, analyze the results and offer your own version of a singer or group that you should also like. The service has several databases - on music artists, films, books and people. Thus, the resource includes four services: Gnod Music, Gnod Books, Gnod Movies and Flork. The latest service, Flork, is a social experiment in discovering people who are interested in communicating with each other. We were happy to test the music section of this service and introduced three artists - Gerry and the Pacemakers, The Beatles and Hollies. Our selection was not random - these three groups belong to the era of the sixties, to an interesting phenomenon called the British Invasion. All these bands played a beat, and the search engine had to suggest a band or artist in the same style. And so it happened. The result offered to us is the group Archies, which in the late sixties was on the lips of all Americans with their cheerful song Sugar Sugar. After playing with the search engine for some time, we came to the conclusion that gnod.net often gives correct advice and is not mistaken very often. For clarity, the search engine can provide the results of its “advice” in the form of an animated cloud with the names of groups, authors or films. The database can be replenished independently by having “conversations” with the search engine and answering its questions in the style of “I like this” or “I don’t like this.”

Alldll.net - finds library files

We recommend that you immediately bookmark this search engine, as sooner or later it will definitely come in handy. Probably everyone has at least once encountered the problem of a missing dll library in their system. This usually results in programs or games refusing to launch, and the message “Couldn't find *****.dll” appear on the screen." There can be many reasons for this, for example, the absence of a file may be caused by incorrect removal of a previously installed application , accidental file corruption, etc. In addition, the developer could simply not include this library in the distribution of his product.

Correcting the situation is very simple - just find the missing file on the Internet, download it and copy it to the directory of the program that refuses to start, or to the ..WINDOWSsystem32... folder. You can find and download the missing file easily and quickly using this service. The resource www.alldll.net is a searchable database of the most popular dll libraries. The files are sorted alphabetically and there is a search function. You can search for the file you are looking for even if you only know the approximate name of the library. It is enough to start entering text in the request field, and at the bottom of the page a huge list of files will appear that begin with the letters that were typed.

Medpoisk.ru - search for medical information

Despite the fact that this search engine uses the search engine from Google, this in no way reduces its value. Medpoisk.ru is a universal search engine that is designed to search exclusively on medical sites. This site is an excellent tool for every physician and anyone who wants to get an answer to any question in the field of medicine. How to treat this or that disease, what are the contraindications for this or that medicine, which doctor to see - all this and much more can be found out by “asking” a search engine. The search engine includes a labor exchange and can be used to search for work among medical professionals. The resource also contains a catalog of medical institutions sorted by region. Among these institutions are the addresses of clinics, medical centers of various specialties, maternity hospitals, diagnostic centers, beauty salons, etc. We sincerely wish you to use this search service solely out of curiosity, and not out of necessity.

Taggalaxy.de - search for images and photos

Perhaps you have heard about the popular image sharing service Flickr.com? This is the same service that was blocked by the Chinese authorities in 2007 after photographs of the sad events of 1989 in Tiananmen Square, located in the Chinese capital Beijing, appeared on its pages. Flickr.com is one of the first Web 2.0 services, and the number of images uploaded by users is in the billions. The number of pictures uploaded to the servers of this service is so large that in order to find a specific image in this ocean of photographs and paintings, a separate search engine is needed. The service offers an image search service, but there is a more interesting way to search for images - using the unusual search engine taggalaxy.de. This search service is a tool for searching images on Flickr.com, with previews. What makes it unusual is the search interface, which is completely three-dimensional. The process of searching by keyword is reminiscent of some kind of computer game - different celestial bodies fly in outer space, between which you can move in the virtual world.

After the keyword query is completed, a system of the sun and planets that revolve around the star will appear on the screen. Each celestial body has its own purpose and is “signed” with a word. In the center of the galaxy is the sun, the key query, all other bodies are auxiliary words, clarifications. If you click on the sun, this object will come closer, and photographs will fly towards it from all sides and surround it, the content of which is determined by the search query. This three-dimensional model with photographs can be rotated in virtual space, examining in detail and searching for the image of interest. After this, just click on the picture to enlarge it in size, and then you can better examine it and read the description.

While working with this search engine, you can use the scrolling function - it allows you to zoom in or out of three-dimensional planets. The remaining planets that are visible in the search engine interface after the request are auxiliary words that allow you to clarify the request. For example, if you enter “Sky” into the search field, then among the qualifying words-planets there will be the words “clouds”, “sunset”, “blue” and other tags of similar meaning that users specified when using the Flickr.com service. The disadvantage of the search engine is that taggalaxy.de does not support the Russian language, so queries can only be entered in Latin.

Nigma.ru - filters results from other search engines

Among all the search engines that can be found on the Internet, there is a special group of search engines. It differs from all others in that they implement a multi-search function, that is, simultaneous search in several search engines. One of these multi-search systems is the Russian service Nigma.ru.

Nigma contains its own resource base, but in addition it allows you to search immediately across all the most popular search engines, including Google, MSN, Yandex, Rambler, AltaVista, Yahoo and Aport. The mechanism for selecting results in this search engine differs from most accepted methods of site discovery. The fact is that the engine of this service uses clustering of results. What does this mean? Imagine that you decide to find out for yourself what “rendering” is. Having compared the results in different search engines, the Nigma.ru engine selected the most likely results and, at the same time, on the left side of the window, next to the list of search results, displayed the so-called clusters - “visualization”, “creation”, “system”, “rendering”, “process”, “studio max”, “computer graphics” and other words and phrases. These clusters represent a thematic group of found documents. This way, you can quickly narrow your search or specify your search query. In Nigma.ru, you can also use categories to limit the area from which results will be selected - for example, perform a search only taking into account music resources or display results only for images. Another opportunity of this service may be of interest to schoolchildren and students. Nigma.ru offers the services Nigma-mathematics and Nigma-chemistry. The first is designed for quickly solving simple equations and various arithmetic operations, the second allows you to work with formulas of chemical reactions. The search service recognizes more than a thousand physical, mathematical constants and units of measurement, allowing you to quickly convert from one dimension to another.

Searchme.com - search engine with preview

Everyone knows that in order to find specific information on the Internet, you need to spend a lot of time. When viewing search results, the user basically opens resources at random, not knowing for sure whether he will find what interests him on the new page, or whether it will be a waste of time. The creators of the search service searchme.com thought about this problem and came up with an original solution. The essence of this solution was to create a search engine in which the user could look at a rough thumbnail of the page before it loaded. This would allow us to form an additional opinion about the seriousness of the resource and its content.

The implementation of this idea was simply magnificent - the created search engine has a beautiful animated three-dimensional interface and shows search results in the form of an animated ribbon of thumbnails, thumbnail screenshots of web pages that include the search keyword. The tape with the results, like a film with old negatives, can be scrolled in the browser window using a special slider located under the string of images. The sketches are loaded instantly, so there are no delays in drawing the results. It is especially convenient to work with search results in full-screen mode - then you can even make out the text of articles in the thumbnails of the results. To appreciate the convenience of this system, just try browsing news resources. Photos for the main news on the title page of the web publication will immediately make it clear which news on this resource is considered the most important.

The solution is a specialized torrent search engine. There are a lot of sites on the Internet that search for torrent resources. However, torrent-finder.com has an undeniable advantage over other search engines - this service allows you to search for files on a huge number of trackers simultaneously.

Hello, dear readers of the blog site. , then its few users had enough of their own bookmarks. However, as you remember, it happened in geometric progression, and very soon it became more difficult to navigate in all its diversity.

Then directories appeared (Yahoo, Dmoz and others), in which their authors added and sorted various sites into categories. This immediately made life easier for the then, not yet very numerous users of the global network. Many of these catalogs are still alive today.

But after some time, the size of their databases became so large that the developers first thought about creating a search within them, and then about creating an automated system for indexing all Internet content in order to make it accessible to everyone.

The main search engines of the Russian-speaking segment of the Internet

As you understand, this idea was implemented with stunning success, but, however, everything turned out well only for a handful of selected companies that managed not to disappear on the Internet. Almost all search engines that appeared in the first wave have now either disappeared, languished, or were bought by more successful competitors.

A search engine is a very complex and, importantly, very resource-intensive mechanism (this means not only material resources, but also human ones). Behind the seemingly simple , or its ascetic analogue from Google, there are thousands of employees, hundreds of thousands of servers and many billions of investments that are necessary for this colossus to continue to operate and remain competitive.

Entering this market now and starting from scratch is more of a utopia than a real business project. For example, one of the world's richest corporations, Microsoft, has been trying to gain a foothold in the search market for decades, and only now their search engine Bing is slowly beginning to meet their expectations. And before that there was a whole series of failures and setbacks.

What can we say about entering this market without any special financial influences. For example, our domestic search engine Nigma has a lot of useful and innovative things in its arsenal, but their traffic is thousands of times lower than the leaders of the Russian market. For example, take a look at the daily Yandex audience:

In this regard, we can assume that the list of the main (best and luckiest) search engines of the Runet and the entire Internet has already been formed and the whole intrigue lies only in who will eventually devour whom, or how their percentage share will be distributed if they all survive and will stay afloat.

Russian search engine market is very clearly visible and here, probably, we can distinguish two or three main players and a couple of minor ones. In general, a rather unique situation has developed in RuNet, which, as I understand it, has repeated itself only in two other countries in the world.

I'm talking about the fact that the Google search engine, having come to Russia in 2004, has still not been able to take leadership. In fact, they tried to buy Yandex around this period, but something didn’t work out there and now “our Russia”, along with the Czech Republic and China, are those places where the almighty Google, if not defeated, then, in any case, met serious resistance.

In fact, to see the current state of affairs among the best search engines on the RuNet Anyone can. It will be enough to paste this URL into the address bar of your browser:

Http://www.liveinternet.ru/stat/ru/searches.html?period=month;total=yes

The fact is that most of them use .

After entering the given Url, you will see a picture that is not very attractive and presentable, but it well reflects the essence of the matter. Pay attention to the top five search engines from which sites in Russian receive traffic:

Yes, of course, not all resources with Russian-language content are located in this zone. There are also SU and RF, and general areas like COM or NET are full of Internet projects focused on Runet, but still, the sample is quite representative.

This dependence can be presented in a more colorful way, as, for example, someone did online for his presentation:

This doesn't change the essence. There are a couple of leaders and several very, very far behind search engines. By the way, I have already written about many of them. Sometimes it can be quite interesting to plunge into the history of success or, conversely, to delve into the reasons for the failures of once promising search engines.

So, in order of importance for Russia and the Runet as a whole, I will list them and give them brief characteristics:

Searching on Google has already become a household word for many people on the planet - you can read about it in the link. In this search engine, I liked the “translation of results” option, when you received answers from all over the world, but in your native language, but now, unfortunately, it is not available (at least on google.ru).

Lately I have also been puzzled by the quality of their output (Search Engine Result Page). Personally, I always first use the RuNet mirror search engine (there is one there, well, I’m used to it) and only if I don’t find an intelligible answer there, I turn to Google.

Usually the release of them made me happy, but lately it has only puzzled me - sometimes such nonsense comes out. It is possible that their struggle to increase income from contextual advertising and the constant shuffling of search results in order to discredit SEO promotion may lead to the opposite result. In any case, this search engine has a competitor on the RuNet, and what kind of one at that.

I think that it is unlikely that anyone will specifically go to Go.mail.ru to search in RuNet. Therefore, traffic to entertainment projects from this search engine can be significantly more than ten percent. Owners of such projects should pay attention to this system.

However, in addition to the clear leaders in the search engine market of the Russian-language segment of the Internet, there are several more players whose share is quite low, but nevertheless the very fact of their existence makes it necessary to say a few words about them.

Runet search engines from the second echelon

Internet-wide search engines

By and large, on the scale of the entire Internet there is only one serious player - Google. This is the undisputed leader, but it still has some competition.

First of all, it's still the same Bing, which, for example, has a very good position in the American market, especially considering that its engine is also used on all Yahoo services (almost a third of the entire US search market).

Well, secondly, due to the huge share that users from China make up in the total number of Internet users, their main search engine called Baidu wedges itself into the distribution of places on the world Olympus. He was born in 2000 and now his share is about 80% of the entire national audience in China.

It is difficult to say anything more intelligible about Baidu, but on the Internet there are opinions that places in its Top are occupied not only by the sites most relevant to the request, but also by those who paid for it (directly to the search engine, and not to the SEO office). Of course, this applies primarily to commercial listings.

In general, looking at the statistics, it becomes clear why Google easily agrees to worsen its search results in exchange for increasing profits from contextual advertising. In fact, they are not afraid of user churn, because in most cases they have nowhere to go. This situation is somewhat sad, but we'll see what happens next.

By the way, to make life even more difficult for optimizers, and perhaps to maintain peace of mind for users of this search engine, Google has recently used encryption when transmitting queries from users’ browsers to the search bar. Soon it will no longer be possible to see in the statistics of visitor counters what queries Google users came to you for.

Of course, in addition to the search engines mentioned in this publication, there are thousands of others - regional, specialized, exotic, etc. Trying to list and describe them all in one article would be impossible, and probably not necessary. Let's better say a few words about how easy it is to create a search engine and how easy and inexpensive it is to keep it up to date.

The vast majority of systems work on similar principles (read about this and that) and pursue the same goal - to give users an answer to their question. Moreover, this answer must be relevant (corresponding to the question), comprehensive and, which is not unimportant, relevant (of the first freshness).

Solving this problem is not so easy, especially considering that the search engine will need to analyze the contents of billions of Internet pages on the fly, weed out the unnecessary ones, and from the remaining ones form a list (issue), where the most appropriate answers to the user’s question will appear first.

This extremely complex task is solved by preliminary collection of information from these pages using various indexing robots. They collect links from already visited pages and load information from them into the search engine database. There are bots that index text (a regular and fast bot that lives on news and frequently updated resources so that the latest data is always presented in the search results).

In addition, there are robots that index images (for their subsequent output to), favicons, site mirrors (for their subsequent comparison and possible gluing), bots that check the functionality of Internet pages, which users or through tools for webmasters (here you can read about, and) .

The indexing process itself and the subsequent process of updating index databases are quite time-consuming. Although Google does this much faster than its competitors, at least Yandex, which takes a week or two to do this (read about).

Typically, a search engine breaks the text content of an Internet page into individual words, which are reduced to the basic principles, so that it can then give correct answers to questions asked in different morphological forms. All the extra stuff in the form of HTML tags, spaces, etc. things are deleted, and the remaining words are sorted alphabetically and their position in this document is indicated next to them.

This kind of thing is called a reverse index and allows you to search not by web pages, but by structured data located on the search engine servers.

The number of such servers for Yandex (which searches mainly only for Russian-language sites and a little for Ukrainian and Turkish) is in the tens or even hundreds of thousands, and for Google (which searches in hundreds of languages) - in the millions.

Many servers have copies, which serve both to increase the security of documents and help increase the speed of request processing (by distributing the load). Estimate the costs of maintaining this entire economy.

The user's request will be sent by the load balancer to the server segment that is currently least loaded. Then an analysis is carried out of the region from which the search engine user sent his request, and a morphological analysis of it is done. If a similar query was recently entered in the search bar, then the user is given data from the cache so as not to overload the servers again.

If the request has not yet been cached, then it is transferred to the area where the search engine’s index database is located. In response, you will receive a list of all Internet pages that are at least somewhat related to the request. Not only direct occurrences are taken into account, but also other morphological forms, as well as, etc. things.

Their needs to be ranked and at this stage the algorithm (artificial intelligence) comes into play. In fact, the user's request is multiplied through all possible options for its interpretation, and answers to many requests are simultaneously searched (through the use of query language operators, some of which are available to ordinary users).

As a rule, the search results contain one page from each site (sometimes more). are now very complex and take into account many factors. In addition, to correct them, and are used, which manually evaluate reference sites, which allows you to adjust the operation of the algorithm as a whole.

In general, it is clear that the matter is dark. We can talk about this for a long time, but it is already clear that user satisfaction with a search system is achieved, oh, how difficult it is. And there will always be those who don’t like something, like you and me, dear readers.

Good luck to you! See you soon on the pages of the blog site

You can watch more videos by going to

");">

Among computers.

Google – Global – 79.79%
Bing - 7.13%
Baidu - 6.77%
Yahoo – Global – 5.20%
Ask – Global – 0.14%
AOL – Global – 0.05%
Excite – Global – 0.01%

Here's what it looks like in diagram form.

And here is how the shares of search engines changed throughout the year.

Among mobile.

Google – Global – 96.10%
Yahoo – Global – 1.65%
Bing - 0.88%
Baidu - 0.60%
Ask – Global – 0.04%
AOL – Global – 0.00%

But among mobile phones, in annual terms, almost nothing has changed. Although this is understandable. Google is the absolute leader here.

At the beginning of the period, Google's share was 95.37%, at the end of the period 96.1%. Now you can see why Google is so actively promoting its mobile platform. Because it allows it to lead in the number of search queries in the mobile segment.

However, the statistics on individual search sites in the computer version are interesting.

1.Google - 23.82%
2.Google India - 15.15%
3.Bing - 7.13%
4.Baidu - 6.77%
5.Yahoo! Web Sites - 4.25%
26.Google Russia - 0.71%
82.Yandex (Russia) - 0.043%

10th place in the world - Google Russia - 1.46%

74th place in the world - Yandex (Russia) - 0.06%

The most popular Russian-language search engines.

But these were statistics common to the whole world. But on the Russian-language Internet, the situation is completely different. The situation is different, but the trends are the same. Namely, Google has become a leader in this segment of the Internet. True, the gap is still very small. For comparison, I will give the figures from a year ago, that is, for May 2016, and today’s figures, for May 2017. Data from Liveinternet information

May 2017.

Google - 49.7%
Yandex – 45.0%
Mail.ru - 4.6%
Rambler - 0.3%
Bing – 0.2%

Yandex – 50.0%
Google – 43.0%
Search.Mail.ru — 6.0%
Rambler - 0.4%
Bing - 0.4%

In these statistics, both the version for computers and for mobile phones are taken into account at the same time.

Conclusion.

Internet search is a business worth tens of billions of dollars annually. And the competition here is very tough. And although Google is a global leader, it has strong regional and global competitors. A clear regional competitor is Yandex, which, however, lost its leadership this month.

At first glance, it may seem that only Yandex can be better than Google, and even that is not a fact. These companies invest huge amounts of money in innovation and development. Does anyone really have a chance not only to compete with the leaders, but also to win? Lifehacker's answer: “Yes!” There are several search engines that have succeeded. Let's look at our heroes.

What is this

This is a fairly well-known open source search engine. Servers are located in the USA. In addition to its own robot, the search engine uses results from other sources: Yahoo! Search BOSS, Wikipedia, Wolfram|Alpha.

The better

DuckDuckGo positions itself as a search engine that provides maximum privacy and confidentiality. The system does not collect any data about the user, does not store logs (no search history), and the use of cookies is as limited as possible.

DuckDuckGo does not collect or share personal information from users. This is our privacy policy.
Gabriel Weinberg, founder of DuckDuckGo

Why do you need this

All major search engines are trying to personalize search results based on data about the person in front of the monitor. This phenomenon is called the “filter bubble”: the user sees only those results that are consistent with his preferences or that the system deems as such.

DuckDuckGo creates an objective picture that does not depend on your past behavior on the Internet, and eliminates thematic advertising from Google and Yandex based on your queries. With DuckDuckGo, it’s easy to search for information in foreign languages: Google and Yandex by default give preference to Russian-language sites, even if the query is entered in another language.

What is this

"" is a Russian metasearch system developed by Moscow State University graduates Viktor Lavrenko and Vladimir Chernyshov. It searches through the indexes of Google, Bing, Yandex and others, and also has its own search algorithm.

The better

Searching through the indexes of all major search engines allows you to generate relevant results. In addition, Nigma divides the results into several thematic groups (clusters) and invites the user to narrow the search field, discarding unnecessary ones or highlighting priority ones. Thanks to the Mathematics and Chemistry modules, you can solve mathematical problems and request the results of chemical reactions directly in the search bar.

Why do you need this

Eliminates the need to search for the same query in different search engines. The cluster system makes it easy to manipulate search results. For example, Nigma collects results from online stores into a separate cluster. If you do not intend to buy anything, then simply exclude this group. By selecting the “English-language sites” cluster, you will receive results only in English. The Mathematics and Chemistry modules will help schoolchildren.

Unfortunately, the project is not currently being developed, as the developers have transferred their activity to the Vietnamese market. Nevertheless, “Nigma” is not only not outdated yet, but in some things it still gives Google a head start. Let's hope development resumes.

What is this

not Evil is a system that searches the anonymous Tor network. To use it, you need to go to this network, for example, by launching a specialized browser of the same name. not Evil is not the only search engine of its kind. There is LOOK (the default search in the Tor browser, accessible from the regular Internet) or TORCH (one of the oldest search engines on the Tor network) and others. We settled on not Evil because of the clear allusion to Google itself (just look at the start page).

The better

It searches where Google, Yandex and other search engines are generally closed.

Why do you need this

The Tor network contains many resources that cannot be found on the law-abiding Internet. And as government control over the content of the Internet tightens, their number will grow. Tor is a kind of Network within the Network: with its own social networks, torrent trackers, media, trading platforms, blogs, libraries, and so on.

YaCy

What is this

YaCy is a decentralized search engine that works on the principle of P2P networks. Each computer on which the main software module is installed scans the Internet independently, that is, it is analogous to a search robot. The results obtained are collected into a common database that is used by all YaCy participants.

The better

It’s difficult to say whether this is better or worse, since YaCy is a completely different approach to organizing search. The absence of a single server and owner company makes the results completely independent of anyone's preferences. The autonomy of each node eliminates censorship. YaCy is capable of searching the deep web and non-indexed public networks.

Why do you need this

If you are a supporter of open source software and a free Internet, not subject to the influence of government agencies and large corporations, then YaCy is your choice. It can also be used to organize a search within a corporate or other autonomous network. And even though YaCy is not very useful in everyday life, it is a worthy alternative to Google in terms of the search process.

Pipl

What is this

Pipl is a system designed to search for information about a specific person.

The better

The authors of Pipl claim that their specialized algorithms search more efficiently than “regular” search engines. In particular, priority sources of information include social network profiles, comments, member lists, and various databases that publish information about people, such as court decisions. Pipl's leadership in this area is confirmed by assessments from Lifehacker.com, TechCrunch and other publications.

Why do you need this

If you need to find information about a person living in the US, then Pipl will be much more effective than Google. The databases of Russian courts are apparently inaccessible to the search engine. Therefore, he does not cope so well with Russian citizens.

What is this

Another specialized search engine. Searches for various sounds (house, nature, cars, people, etc.) in open sources. The service does not support queries in Russian, but there is an impressive list of Russian-language tags that you can search for.

The better

The output contains only sounds and nothing extra. In the search settings you can set the desired format and sound quality. All sounds found are available for download. There is a search for sounds by pattern.

Why do you need this

If you need to quickly find the sound of a musket shot, the blows of a suckling woodpecker, or the cry of Homer Simpson, then this service is for you. And I chose this only from the available Russian-language queries. In English the spectrum is even wider. But seriously, a specialized service requires a specialized audience. But what if it comes in handy for you too?

The life of alternative search engines is often fleeting. Lifehacker asked the former general director of the Ukrainian branch of Yandex, Sergei Petrenko, about the long-term prospects of such projects.

As for the fate of alternative search engines, it is simple: to be very niche projects with a small audience, therefore without clear commercial prospects or, conversely, with complete clarity of their absence.

If you look at the examples in the article, you can see that such search engines either specialize in a narrow but popular niche, which, perhaps, has not yet grown enough to be noticeable on the radars of Google or Yandex, or they are testing an original hypothesis in ranking, which is not yet applicable in regular search.

For example, if a search on Tor suddenly turns out to be in demand, that is, results from there are needed by at least a percentage of Google’s audience, then, of course, ordinary search engines will begin to solve the problem of how to find them and show them to the user. If the behavior of the audience shows that for a significant proportion of users in a significant number of queries, results given without taking into account factors depending on the user seem more relevant, then Yandex or Google will begin to produce such results.

“Be better” in the context of this article does not mean “be better at everything.” Yes, in many aspects our heroes are far from Google and Yandex (even far from Bing). But each of these services gives the user something that the search industry giants cannot offer.