What is a Search Engine

Hi, this is Michael Callahan “Doctor File Finder” and welcome to your Butterscotch.com tutorial on what is a search engine. Many people have a misconception about what a search engine is, you can see here if you do a search using the search engine, there are a number of definitions, they are all basically the same, a search engine, a computer program that retrieves documents, files or data from a database or a computer network, especially from the internet. In Wikipedia there’s also a definition of web search engine and here are the top search engines so far for 2009, Google, Yahoo, Bing, which is formerly Microsoft Live Search and Ask.

So a search engine like Google or Bing or Yahoo searches the entire internet then provides you with results to your query. Other search engines search perhaps one site so there are tens of thousands of search engines that each search one specific site or perhaps a group of sites. Some other sites like America On Line for example have their own search but their search is powered by Google, so it’s not really an AOL search, it’s a Google search.

So, a search engine is a software program, it’s not a website, here’s Google, Yahoo, Bing, Ask, AltaVista, one of the earliest search engines and Lycos. All search engines all provides you with answers to your queries. So that’s a search engine and that’s all there is to it.


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