Wednesday, February 18, 2009

What Are Search Engines

With 6.6 billion people worldwide using the Internet (according to Internet World Stats) and around 156 million websites to look at, it is essential that these people can search the Internet more accurately for what they are looking for.

A search engine is an information retrieval system that searches for sites based on the words that you designate in your specific search term. Thus minimising the time required to find information you actually require.

Search engines automatically create website listings by using spiders (also called a "crawler" or a "bot") that "crawl" web pages and any corresponding links to other web pages. Search engines then place this collected information into a huge index (sometimes called a "catalog") so that when a search query is requested, the search engines can look through their own index of information in order to find exactly what seachers are looking for. Search engine spiders frequently return to previously crawled websites on a regular basis in order to check for updates or changes.

The Open Directory Project lists 370 search engines available for Internet users. However statistics show that there are only four main search engines. These are Google, Yahoo, Microsoft (MSN) and ASK.

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