Beyond Surfing: Search Engines
Beyond Surfing: Search Engines
Search Engines - Best used for: finding specific sites, or specific information
Search engines use software called spiders, webcrawlers, or bots to automatically collect the words on millions of Web pages. These words are fed into a searchable database. So when you search a search engine, you are not searching the Web - you are searching the search engine's index of Web pages collected
by its spider in the recent (or not-so-recent) past.
Relevancy software determines in what order hits are listed. Search engines are extremely incomplete in terms of retrieving most of what is available. Also, there is little overlap between the search engines' databases. Therefore, use more than one search engine on a regular basis.
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