Although nearly everyone who has spent time on the Internet has conducted some type of search to find a web site or web page, not everyone really understands what a search engine is, or how it finds all those pages. You may be wondering how a search engine is able to find and store billions of pages of information, or how a search engine knows exactly what web page to show you when you conduct a search.
Right now there are literally billions of pages of information on the Web, with more being added every day. Finding your way around, or even knowing where to start can be difficult.
It’s important to understand that you cannot truly search the actual World Wide Web. The web is made up of billions of documents that sit on computers throughout the world and there is simply no way for your personal computer to find or visit all of them directly. Even the most complex computers designed for this task are unable to find and index every last web page in existence. What you can do is to visit a web site that is designed to search out these pages one at a time and then collect them in a manner that you can access. In other words, you can visit a search engine.
Search engine are designed to make surfing the web simple, fast and rewarding for Internet users. They gather together information, store it in a database, and allow you to access a list of individual pages based on a word, or set of words that you submit in the form of a query.
Check out Search Engines 101 to get more information!