Inventor's Guide to Trademarks and Patents, The

Search Engines

The way that some search engines work is very different from subject directory types of search engines. While humans often times organize and catalog subject directories around topics, some search engines rely on computer programs called spiders or robots (a jargon term is bots) to “crawl” the Web and automatically log the words on each page. This is very different from relying on a directory structure to locate information.

With this type of search engine, keywords related to a topic are typed into a search “box.” The search engine then typically scans its database and returns a file with links to Web sites containing the word or words specified. Because these databases are very large, search engines often return thousands of ...