Search Engine 101 for Real Estate Agents

What are search engines?

Search engines are really just databases which compile a listing of web pages based on a set of criteria. There are two methods for collecting the data that goes into a search engine database: manually by human editors or automatically by computer programs called 'spiders' or 'crawlers'. In the early days of the web, all the search engines used the manual human editor approach with the best example being Yahoo!. Today the major search engines primarily use the automated 'spider' approach with Google being the best example and some like Yahoo! now use a combination of both methods.

How do search engines work?

Search engines help establish an order and flow on the Internet by ranking all the pages in their database based on a formula or algorithm. The algorithm looks at the text, links, and “key words” on the pages and gives them a ranking or “relevancy” factor. This ranking permits the search engines to order the results when someone searches for something. Because each of the search engines uses a different algorithm, the search results on their pages may be similar but not exactly the same.

The Top Search Engines

According to recent data from Comscore and reported by SearchEngineWatch, the most popular search engines ranked by percent of total searches are:

  • Google—42.7%
  • Yahoo!—28%
  • MSN—13.2%
  • Others—16.1%
Many of the 16.1% included in the 'other' category actually use Google, Yahoo! or MSN for their search results. Thus it is easy to see that there are really only three dominant players in the search business.