Sunday, May 18, 2003

A search engine is a searchable database of web sites which have been collected by a computer program (usually called a crawler, robot, or spider). Although there may appear to be a choice of hundreds of search engines on the web, in reality most of them rely on the same major search engines.

Google is the most popular choice for web searchers. It offers the largest collection of web pages of any crawler-based search engine. Google makes use of link analysis as a way to rank pages. Google provides web page search results to a variety of partners, including Yahoo and The Open Directory Project