They are effectively huge databases indexing every piece of information stored on the world wide web (www).
How the Search Engines Work!
Search engines basically have two major functions. The first is to crawl the web and index all the files, directories, web pages etc, acting like a huge inventory of what is contained in the web. The second part is the search element, whereby users can search the index for certain files, and have a list of results displayed to them. The search element is what the vast majority of us are most familiar with.
Search engines crawl the web with the use of automated "spiders". These are simple robots which follow every link they find and collect & store the information on every page they visit. The information gathered is then sorted and categorized. For instance, the title and text contained on a web page, is used to determine what the page is about, and then it is indexed and stored under a certain category.
The user search capability is what makes search engines so useful to the end user. People like you and I can enter a search term in the engine, which then instantly scans through it's stored index listing, picks out the most relevant files related to our search, and then displays a list of results to us.
The search engines basically make it possible for us to browse all the information on the world wide web, and quickly find the most relevant information.
With the vast amount of web pages now stored on the web, there could be literally millions of pages which match any given search term. So a search engines usefulness is determined by the relevancy of the results they display for us, and this has led to ever more complex sets of criteria which the search engines use to sort the results, as different engines compete for users.
At this current time, the 3 major search engines are Google, Yahoo, and Bing (MSN).
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