Search Engines

A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found. Although search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Alta Vista and Excite that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web and USENET newsgroups.

Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible. Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document. Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only meaningful results are returned for each query.

Yahoo	Excite	Infoseek	Altavista	Webcrawler
GoTo	Direct Hit	All the Web	Ask Jeeves	Lycos
Mapquest	Mega Crawler	Savvy Search
Web Wombat	Find A Person	Travel Channels	Dog Pile	Search Spot

 

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