Online! The Book

Search Engines

The Web is huge. There are so many things out there that the next problem is how to find what you want if you don't know the URL. The problem is at least partially solved with search engines. The search engine is a software program used to search for the Web pages, their servers, and associated databases and links. These Internet search engines use a tool known commonly as a spider, although other similar tools are known as harvesters, crawlers, etc. These are automated software robots designed to creep along the Web in search of Web sites to index. (Some search engines use other tools, as well.) The program goes through all the HTML code to gather information that the search engine uses in its algorithm. They often do not go very ...