Today we cover another important topic: search engine development, the process of how to develop a search engine like Google, and how much such a project really costs.
At Azati, we develop and deliver commercial search engines. These engines are completely different from regular ones like Google search engine, Yahoo, Bing, Baidu, and others. Many facts about professional search engine development remain unobvious and are hard to understand without a strong technical background.
Key Steps and Technologies in Search Engine Development
In this article, we provide detailed information on the main types of commercial search engines and the key factors that determine the total search engine development cost.
To find the data in the document that is related to the user query we should:
- Determine the pattern
- Download the page from the database
- Analyze the page (in search of the pattern)
- Build a Search Engine Result Page (also known as SERP)
There are two bottlenecks here, and both are related to the page size:
- It might take some time to download the page (document)
- It usually takes much time to find the pattern, if you are using the standard search approaches
Typically, it requires 2 ms to process a document (HTML page) of a WordPress website (written in PHP). For instance we have about 200 pages. They are processed within 400 ms or half a second. It seems fast enough.
But now imagine that we deal with an e-book library, where millions (!) of books with hundreds of pages are stored. Surprisingly, it takes little time to process it as we do not need to download a single page from the database – we download the whole e-book at once.
So, when you know this, here’s another fact: there are many documents that a search engine cannot quickly process – images, videos, encrypted formats, etc.
Lessons from Google Search Engine Development and Modern Algorithms
You might have thought: “Why can’t Google search engine show us everything we want? Can it find relevant information?”
Yes, it can, actually. Every year, the Google search algorithm becomes more accurate and advanced. Although the search quality improves, there are still many files that cannot be processed even today. Therefore, both public and commercial search engines require careful engineering of indexing algorithms, crawler technology, and database optimization to find relevant data.
By the way, we have an impressive case study – we’ve improved the search engine for the talent acquisition system by tuning their custom search ranking algorithm.
Beyond the Price Tag: Factors That Influence Search Engine Development Cost
From our point of view, the search engine development cost is not the only factor customers should care about when planning a project. There is another aspect that must be considered - long-term maintenance and scalability.
If we look at the big brother, Google search engine, we can see that there are many servers (hundreds of thousands, probably) processing data in real time and, what is more, simultaneously.
Why do they do so? The World Wide Web is a fast-changing environment. There are both static and dynamic pages, and all those pages should be recrawled multiple times to track the data changes (if there are any).
In this way, Google processes the same data over and over again to make SERP fit the user query. It is the best and the most effective way to monitor changes, mainly if there are sextillions of pages available.
Large search engine developers use complex algorithms to look for “footprints” in the document.
For example, we do not need to collect all the data about the book when we can spot the key thesis in its summary.
This way, we recognize the footprint that contains the necessary data: author, titles, summary, brief description, keywords, publication data, etc., and add this footprint to a separate database.
When the user instructs Google search engine to find something, the system looks for the pattern in the footprint database first. If it doesn’t find a matching answer, it performs a deep search. If this is the case, the pages are generated at a slower pace.
You can check it yourself – make a complex query and compare the SERP generation time for different pages (usually, the first page pops up far quicker than the thirtieth).
If there are hundreds of thousands of servers needed to perform a search, so how much does it cost to develop a search engine like Google?
Well, nobody knows the exact estimates. The only thing we know for sure – a lot.
Google is now setting up new powerful servers to process data in a quicker, more accurate and secure way. Thus, even the most complicated and in-depth queries will be performed in an instant and generate precise results.
We discovered how Google works. Now let’s see how commercial search engines process data.
We can use two approaches:
- Develop a lightning-fast search engine powered by solid mathematical knowledge, modern databases, SSD drive and coded with the fast programming language like C++;
- Develop a “footprint” database.
These two approaches affect search engine development costs. Customers usually prefer the first one as it is more accurate but slightly more expensive.
Average Budgets and Price Ranges for Custom Search Engine Development
If you want to build a search engine from scratch in Python or PHP, for example, you can do it for free after completing some courses at Udemy, Mindvalley, EDX. It requires some programming skills though. In case of paid courses, it will cost you up to $100.
If you want to build a search engine like Google (with a decent search quality), we would say it might cost you about $100M (for the prototype) – including costs for servers, bandwidth, colocation, electricity and so on. Maintenance costs for the existing cluster may go up to $25M per year.
If you want to create a commercial search engine for your business – be it the insurance, bioinformatics, healthcare, e-commerce, or other company – the search engine development costs may range from $10,000 to $60,000, with a low maintenance fee.
Final Thoughts: Planning Your Search Engine Development Project
As you can see, building a search engine has several aspects you should consider besides cost.
The answer to the question “how to develop a search engine like Google” covers different nuances which fully depend on your needs, budget and the main objective: whether you want to create your own search engine or compete with global leaders.
Need a custom search engine tailored to your business goals? Get in touch with Azati and let's build a solution that works for your data and users.
