Using Search Engines and Web Directories

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Because of the growing amount of documents contained on the Internet, search engines and Web directories can be useful tools for locating specific information. A search engine is a tool designed to search the Internet for keywords or phrases designated as search terms by users. Web browsers link to search engines by clicking the Search button on the menu bar. A list of search engines will appear and the user may select the particular engine preferred.

While a search engine does not search the Internet itself, it does search a database of information. These databases are assembled when search engines send out applications called spiders (also called robots, bots, or crawlers) to look for new, changed, or defunct sites. Spiders are software devices programmed to automatically and continually gather information from all over the Internet. AltaVista and HotBot, for example, search more than 10 million pages per day.[1] Both Infoseek and Excite claim to have more than 50 million total pages indexed.[2] When sites are found, the spiders send back the information to the site index where it changes or updates the search engine database. Each engine searches a different database, which accounts for the diverse …