Modern Search Engines: A Journey of Technological Advancements, Privacy, and User-Centered Improvements for Information Need

Search Engines (SEs) become increasingly important for locating, organizing, and retrieving relevant information in a world of massive and complex digital information. However, contemporary SEs are poor at striking a balance between precision and comprehensiveness, particularly when conducting exploratory or specific information queries. Therefore, the study aims to find out which search engine most effectively satisfied the needs of various users with a lower amount of time and effort. In order to solve this issue, ten such as SEs consisting of Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Swisscows, Qwant, Ecosia, Ask.com, WolframAlpha, and StartPage, were tested using two user-effort-sensitive measures: time to relevant result and number of relevant results. The study employed a lot of standard search queries and placed emphasis on the performance of each engine. Ultimately, we established that Google (83%) and StartPage (80%) delivered the most suitable results, while Ask.com (26%) and Swisscows (43%) performed less. In conclusion, contemporary SEs are getting better, but current ones still contain privacy problems, omitted results, and un balanced performance. The future research ought to be dedicated to enhancing ranking techniques, better search systems, and functionality which will benefit even more people, such as non-English users.