As the internet grew in popularity, then exploded into a huge amount of data, search engines faced increasing challenges. As thousands of pages are added every day, and many of those are changed on a daily basis, search engines have to constantly update their information regarding those sites. Part of the search engine race has been attempts to make the crawling more efficient and faster, so that the search engines can document new web sites when they come up. Some search engines download entire sites and keep the entire thing in its own hard drives.

When one thinks of modern search engines, the thing that most likely comes to mind is Google. It definitely wasn't one of the pioneers, since it only started to gain popularity around 2001. However, it grew insanely fast, and now has the majority market share by far of any search engine, with 74% of all searches in the world made by Google. Its popularity can be attributed to the fact that it brought about many new and revolutionary techniques for listing pages. It considered factors such as popularity, original content, choices of past searches, how many other sites link to the one in question, and more than 100 other factors. These brought the best results to the top of the page.

The success of Google not only affected the everyday user's habits, but also the development of almost all other search engines on the market. Search engines today spend their capital developing intricate algorithms to decide which sites belong at the top of the rankings. Other top search engines include Yahoo! Search, AltaVista, and Windows Live Search. Since there are so many choices working so efficiently to index the latest web sites and information, you can surely benefit from using them. You can use search engines to track people down, find out new information, and determine important marketing factors.