Many people are mixing the meaning of web browser and search engine.
Today’s scenario
I am hearing more and more people having the confusion about what search engine and web browser are. Although these two work together, these are two completely different things.
Since Android has come to the mainstream, and more and more people started using this operativing system, people got exposed to some “apps” that are search engines, such as the “Google” app. Google app is an Android application which does searches at the Google search engine and also acts as a funky web browser, that does not accept URLs as input (only accepts web searches). So things got more tied together and confusion starts to settle in.
Definitions
A web browser is an program that let’s you view the Web.
Web is a network where web pages live. Is a subset of the Internet.
A search engine is a website that has gathered information about many web pages, and offers the service of showing a result of web pages (from their gathered information) that more closely match a search query.
A search query is the information, related to a web search, that is sent to the search engine. It is more commonly composed by search keywords, and can also have more information, such as country, date, etc..
Google is the company of software that has created the google.com website, which is a website to do web searches (google.com is a “search engine”).
Google Chrome is a web browser that Google has forked, from Chromium (which is another web browser). Firefox is also a web browser (from Mozilla).
So Google (as in google.com) and Google Chrome gets confused sometimes, but these are two different things. Google Chrome is a web browser, Google is the company owner of google.com. And google.com is a search engine.
There are many
There are many search engines services besides what Google offers. Some of them are: Searx, Bing, Yahoo, Mojeek, Qwant, DuckDuckGo, etc..
There are many web browsers, besides Google Chrome. Some of them are: Firefox, Icecat, Tor Browser, Nyxt, Chromium, Qutebrowser, etc..
Last piece of information
A web browser may have many search engines configured.
Google Chrome may do web searches on other search engines, besides its default one, which is google.com.
And google.com may be configured on most web browsers to perform the web browser’s web searches.
