Search Engines bring together the best of search including images, videos, news, maps and people in your social networks to help you spend less time searching and more time doing. Search engines made their appearance shortly after the launch of web 20 years ago. Since then new search engine features are evolving every day. New innovations are being incorporated like the Meta search, faceted search results, the federated search results and predictive type ahead results.These features have made it easy for businesses to connect with the target audience easily. The filters also help the audience to find their desired contents on the web networks within a quick time. Now Social Search, a new way of searching is focused mostly focused on your social media connections than a regular search. Below is a chart that displays search engine market share for the year 2013 so far.
Search engines are not only for general search, but are also providing the facilities for on-site search. There are open source technologies to help developers design on site search for websites. These on-site searches are provided in three options. They are:
• Free and Open Source Search
• Open Source Enterprise
• Proprietary Enterprise
How an On-site Search Works For the Audience and The Online Enterprise Businesses:
When an enterprise business company is advertising their products on the virtual websites, they will have to keep in mind that the customers will not be able to purchase their products, if they cannot find it. They have to focus on how audience can get the searched content quickly. If the resulted searches indicate an irrelevant content, then a visitor may never go towards another page of that website. The on-site search helps to remove that problem, because the visitors can easily make a search On-site and find the related content.
Goals of On-Site Search:
There are 5 key goals of On-site search. They are:
1) To increase the profits, revenues and other key performance indicators (KPI’s) for the website.
2) To improve the user experience (UX)
3) To clearly understand the expectations of the visitors of the websites.
4) To remain on an effective and useful performance scale.
5) To obtain the results of strong indexing and query matching.
How to Get a Better Performance with On-site Search:
There are several initiatives through which you will be able to improve your performance with on-site search. Here are some of the important tips which may be useful for your business:
Website Testing:
You can measure the benefits you get from on-site search of your website through the help of website testing. You can test different type of results against one another, or against a control group and measure the benefits you are getting form the results. A control group makes you able to see the original search results through which you will be able to determine that what works best for each of the customers.
Optimized Search Results:
You can create and optimize search results for the best ranked products of your website. Simply, these steps mean that you will put your hottest products on the top ranking of the search. You can build a site-wide marketing campaign that is associated with your product, put categories and brands on the tags so that they match the top keywords.
You Can Turn The Missed Results Into Great Opportunities:
When you are improvising your on-site search, never forget the factor of searching misses. You can use the keywords that do not come up with any results and transform them into your opportunities. Let us take a look, that how you can transform the search misses in to your trump card:
• By creating a search term association, so that the visitors can see relevant products in the search results when they input the pointed keywords that misses search results.
• By adding the missing keywords in to the product description. This helps the audience can see them on toprank when they input those missing keywords.
Targeting the Audience:
A customer centric approach will help you to get an increased outcome with the search results. You can try to match your products with the target audiences through some rule-based merchandising sets, like the top sellers by location, new items and also through specific business rules. The relevant search through the specific audience always helps the enterprise business websites to earn a good amount of revenue.
Search Engines Timeline:
Let’s take a look on evolution of search engines in the past two decades:
On 1993, Aliweb & JumpStation introduced the first search engines on virtual index providing the facilities of crawling and indexing web pages.
On 1994, Yahoo was introduced as a pioneer search engine.
On 1995, another two search engines including AltaVista& Exite was launched. This year of Ask Jeeves, Autonomy & doppilealso made their appearance as a search engine on the virtual networks.
On 1998, the giant search engine – Google made its appearance and then after MSN appeared on the web.
On 2006, Google launched the custom search feature. In the same year, Microsoft also evaluated their searching features like Fast Search & Transfer.
On 2009, the debut of Microsoft search engines like Bing, formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search was experienced on the web.
On 2013, Google declared that it will no longer offer the Custom Search Feature as a core site search product.
Today Google is the leading search engine offering everything from image searches, video searches, map searches, news searches, etc. The reason for its success is the impressive keyword relevancy and a continuously improving search algorithm provided by Google.