Difference Between Web Browser And Search Engine

Contents

Hello friends, today you going to read about the difference between web browser and search engine, what is browser and search engine, what are their functions, etc.

Both browser and search engine became an important tool for users all over the world, We can’t imagine a world without search engine or browser, it helps us to find the best possible results for our queries.

Lets take a look at comparative analysis of how a search engine a different from web browser

What is Web Browser?

A Web browser or a browser is a software program that allows you to view and interact with web pages. It works as an interface between the user and the websites on the internet.

A web browser is software that displays the resulting web pages.

You can also say, a software is used to access the information present on the web is called Browser.

The web browser’s job is to send and receive information. You need a web browser and a computer that is connected to the internet to browse the web.

It provides various features, including the capability to locate web pages, download manager, password manager, bookmark manager, security settings, etc.

The starting page of a web browser is called a Home Page; it provides information about site’s purpose and content.

This is a powerful tool that is not just used for personal computers but also on smartphones and feature phones.

World Wide Web was the first Browser developed in 1990. After that in 1993, the mosaic was launched with some more interesting features.

Also Read:  What is internet? Advantages and Disadvantages of internet

Examples of Web Browser

There are lots of options available in the browser segment; you can use any of them for free according to your interest or features. Now take a look at the most popular Web browsers of all time in the world.

World Wide Web: This is the first-ever browser created by Tim Berners in 1990 and it is completely different from today’s World Wide Web. Later the name of this browser is changed to nexus to avoid any confusion with WWW.

Mosaic: You can say this is the second browser and first popular browser created by Marc Andreessen and his team in 1993. The graphical interface and some advanced features like adding images make him popular.

Netscape Navigator: This is the third browser developed by the leader of Mosaic, Marc Andreessen in 1994. There are many versions that come after the launch of this web browser to increase its features or user experience.

Internet Explorer: The most popular web browser of that time, in 1995 the Microsoft launched Internet Explorer for the users and in few years it became the most popular browser. Till 2003 the 95% of the market share was captured by the internet explorer. But in 2015 it was replaced by Microsoft Edge and became the default browser for windows devices. Today the market share of Edge is about 3-4%.

Opera Browser: The founders of opera started working on this project in 1994 and it was officially launched in 1996 by Opera Software ASA. At that time it didn’t become popular but now it has some inbuilt features like adblocker, VPN, etc, which made him a good choice for users. After that in 2005, it was also launched opera for mobile users.

Mozilla Firefox: Mozilla foundation introduced this in 2002, after launched it overtakes the internet explorer market and between 2003-2004 it becomes the dominant browser of that time. The compatibility of every device makes him popular. Now the market share of Firefox is about 3.50%.

Apple Safari: Apple also launched its web browser named Safari in 2003 but is only used by Apple users, This is not preferred by other device users. But now the apple safari is the second most used browser in the world by 18% of the total market share.

UC browser: This is a Chinese browser named UCweb launched in 2004, but don’t get popular but now it becomes popular in countries like Indonesia and India. In 2013 the name of UCweb changed to UC browser for Indian users.

Google Chrome: Finally Google comes in the browser segment and launched google Chrome in September 2008. After that, it captures the 65% market share which makes him the most popular browser. Now it is the most commonly used web browser all over the world. The security and seamless integration among various devices is the best feature of this browser.

Difference between Web Browser and Search Engine — Examples of web browser

Functions of Web Browser

Retrieve the information from World Wide Web and making it available for users in a systematic way is the most important function of any web browser.
Features like incognito safe browsing, download manager, bookmark, or favorite bars, are some most common features of a web browser.
You can open multiple web pages at the same time can give you the best multitasking experience while surfing the web.
You can visit any page by search or adding the direct URL (Uniform resource locator) to the browser, the web server takes us to that web page or website.
There are also some browser extensions and plugins available to give you the best experience while using a web browser.
The browser uses the cache that helps the loading speed of any page and gives the results to the users in few seconds.
The simple and interactive user interface is very helpful to find and use all features of that browser.

What is Search Engine?

This is a software program that helps us to find anything from the web by using keywords or phrases. Just type the keyword in the search engine then they show you results in the form of text, Webpages, websites, images, videos, etc.

When we enter a search query, the search engine finds and looks at the millions of website page titles, keywords, phrases, and content by using its algorithm and provides you the most relevant results at the top.

They used software application known as bots, robots, and spider that travels through all the web content and create a searchable index of the web.

Example: At present Google is the king of Search engines, Bing is in second place.

Google chrome a Web browser that uses Google as its primary search engine, Whereas Microsoft Edge is a web browser that uses Bing Search engine.

Also Read: What is an Operating System (OS)?

Examples of Search Engines

There are some examples of search engines that are used but most of them are not able to function properly today or get shut. Now look at those examples:

Google search engine - difference between web browser and search engine — Google search engine

Google: Google is one of the most popular search engines with a market share of approximately 65-67%. Google was a Stanford University project by students Larry Page and Sergey brin originally called backrub. By 1998, the name had been changed to Google, and the project jumped off the campus and became a company named Google.

Bing: Bing search engine launched in 2009 and owned by Microsoft. Bing finds and organizes the answer you need so you can make faster, more informed decisions.

Yahoo: Yahoo search is a web search engine, launched in 1994, owned by yahoo inc. the search engine helps you to find exactly what you’re looking for. It is the web’s oldest ‘directory’, a place where human editors organize websites into categories.

Duck Duck Go: DuckDuckGo is owned by Duck Duck Go, Inc. which was started by Gabriel Weinberg. You can say this is the safest search engine which gives you results from over 400 sources including Bing, Wikipedia, etc.

Ask Jeeves: Ask Jeeves initially gained fame in 1998 and 1999 as being the ‘natural language’ search engine that lets you search by asking questions and responded with what seemed to be the right answer to everything. Today, ask Jeeves depends on crawler-based technology to provide results to its users.

Lycos: This is one of the oldest search engines on the web launched in 1994. Lycos is owned by Terra Lycos, a company formed with Lycos and terra networks merged in October 2000. Terra Lycos also owns the Hotbot search engine.

AltaVista: Altavista is another search engine that opened in December 1995 and for several years it was the ‘Google’ of its day, in terms of providing relevant results and having a loyal group of users that loved the service. AltaVista was originally owned by digital, then taken over by Compaq, when the company had purchased digital in 1998.

All The Web: It is an excellent crawler-based search engine. All the web.com was owned by a company called FAST. However, this was purchased by search provider Overture in Late April 2003.

Dogpile: This is a metasearch engine, which meanss it gets results from multiple search engines and directories and presents them combined to the user. Dogpile currently gets its results from Google, Yahoo, MSN search, ask about, LookSmart, and more.

Functions of Search Engines

Crawling: The crawler or web spider is the main software for a search engine. They have the ability to search a wide range of websites and collect information at the same time. They find your content through external or internal links. They crawl almost each and every website content and update their new data with old ones.

Indexing: Once they crawled the internet, it indexes that content according to their keywords and phrases in each and every site. keywords phrases are the group of words used by an individual to search any query on the web. The developers of search engines develop their algorithms for searching the web according to keywords and phrases.

Results: After crawling and indexing, it stores the whole data into their database and displays the results when someone searched that query. They try to give you the most relevant results of your search query. Each search engine has its own algorithm to show web results.