Search Engines

Internet commerce is one of the fastest growing industries today. With the wide range of capabilities the web has it make it easier and cost efficient for businesses to make transactions with other businesses. One factor that allows businesses to find each other is search engines. Search engines are part of the reason the web is growing so rapidly.

Search engines have many capabilities from using key words or phrases to find what you are looking for to using general statements to browse the web. But what exactly is a search engine? Search engines are huge databases of web page files that have been assembled automatically by machine. There are two types of search engines. One type is the individual search engine. This type of search engine compiles its information on to its own database making it accessible when you use that particular engine. It does not use any other engine?s information to help with your search. Then there are the meta-searchers which do not have their own databases. They use a combination of individual search engine?s information simultaneously, from a single site and using the same interface. Meta-searchers provide a quick way of finding out which engines are retrieving the best results for you in your search. There are two ways that Meta-searchers show their results. Most use a single list which display multiple-engine search results in a single merged list and had removed all the duplicate entries from the list. The second way that they display their results is through multiple lists. These are separate lists in which are displayed as they are received from each engine leaving the duplicate entries on the list.

Search engines are not very complex in the way that they work. Each search engine sends out spiders to bots into web space going from link to link identifying all pages that it can. After the spiders get to a web page they generally index all the words on that page that are publicly available pages at the site. They then store this information into their databases and when you run a search it matches they key words you searched with the words on the page that the spider indexed. However when you are searching the web using a search engine, you are not searching the entire web as it is presently. You are looking at what the spiders indexed in the past. Spiders regularly