What is a Search Engine
Web visitors generally use search engines to find sites matching their search criteria. The visitor enters words or phrases in the search area, and the search engine produces a list of related sites. The search engine provides this information after conducting a more comprehensive search using indexing software agents, often called “robots” or “spiders.” These robots and spiders are programmed to “crawl” the Internet in search of new or updated web sites. The search engine becomes aware of a new site to visit and index when that site is submitted.
A search engine is a set of programs which are used to search for information within a specific realm and collate that information in a database. People often use this term in reference to an Internet search engine, a search engine which is specifically designed to search the Internet, but search engines can also be devised for offline content, such as a library catalog, the contents of a personal hard drive, or a catalog of museum collections. Search engines help people to organize and display information in a way which makes it readily accessible. There are three aspects to a search engine: crawling, indexing, and searching. When a search engine crawls, it looks for new content which was not present during the last crawl, including updates to files and web pages. Then, the programs index the information, pulling out specific keywords to categorize it. On the Internet, for example, indexing relies heavily on keywords in web pages, and meta tags which provide information about the page
You probably already know some of the most popular search engines – Google and Yahoo for example. Basically, these are programs that look through all the web documents they can find and create indexes of them. People who want to search for something on the web type keywords into search engines to see a list of web pages containing those terms.
Related Questions
- We have some of the best Google and Search Engine placement for key searches of any site. Would you like to see what Web Site comes up at or near the very top of the major search Engines, when someone searches for the single word "Photographers"?
- how do search engines make money?
- What is a Search Engine
