What is web search?
A software program that searches a database and gathers and reports information that contains or is related to specified terms.
A website whose primary function is providing a search engine for gathering and reporting information available on the internet or a portion of the internet.
Search engines are really just massive databases in which information from Internet documents are stored. The information in these databases is collected using a computer program (called a “spider” or a “robot”) that scans the Internet and gathers information about individual documents. These special programs work automatically to find documents or they are asked by a creator of a Web site to visit the site to be included in a database.
When you do a search in a search engine, the order in which the results are listed also varies between search engines.
- how often your search terms are on the Web page;
- where they are located on the page; and,
- how many other Web pages link to the page