Search Engines

So here we have all these web sites scattered across the World Wide Web. How do we find them? More importantly, how do we find specific information stored possibly at any of these web sites? We use something called a search engine.

Search engines are special web sites we can visit just like any other web site. The only difference is that they allow us to type some words (called keywords) and click a button to view matching web sites it finds for us.

How does the search engine match our keywords with web sites? Part of the search engine known as a "spider" or "indexer" automatically travels around the web looking for new web pages. When it finds a new web page, it records any words in that web page. Those words are stored in something called a database. When you enter keywords into a search engine, it produces a list of matching web pages.

There are many different search engines, and each one has a unique set of information. Sometimes to find information on the Internet we have to use more than one search engine.