What the heck is a Search Engine?

May 30, 2006 by Jennifer Farley    No Comments    Posted under: Photoshop Tutorials

If you are brand new to the web and taking your first tentative steps, you may be wondering about Search Engines (because you will undoubtedly have heard about them) and what they do. Search engines are used about 3.5 billion times a day to access information on the web and are the starting point for most people when they’re looking for something on the Internet.

Search engines can be defined as a set of programs that include:

• a spider (crawler, robot or bot) that crawls the Internet looking for web documents. It then follows links from those documents to other web documents. Think of a big spider coming into your house and checking what’s in each room!
• a program that produces an index from the documents found by the spider.
• a program that takes search requests, looks to see what is has in its index and then returns the most relevant results to the user.

The most popular search engines on the web are:

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL, Ask .

If you want to get results from several of these search engines in one go, try out Dogpile. Dogpile chases down the best results from the Internet’s top search engines, including Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN, Ask, About, MIVA, LookSmart and others.

It’s essential that your Web pages are indexed by the search engines, otherwise your site will be hanging out there in oblivion. Laughing Lion Design, submit all our clients websites to the major search engines.

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