WIT 2003

Search engines

A search engine is a Web robot or spider that follows links on the Web and indexes the various Web sites and pages that it comes across. Digital copies of the pages are stored in a database. The search engine then allows users to look for information in this database using a simple or advanced search query.

Using a search engine is simple. The search engine provides a dialog box into which the user enters a query. A search query is a keyword, or string of keywords, that the engine then uses to locate Web pages in its database.

Once the query has been entered, the user then clicks on the "Google Search" button, or hits the "Enter" key on the keyboard. Google will then produce a results page that links to the Web pages that include any mention of the word "puppies" from its database. Here is the Google results page for "puppies."

TRY IT OUT! Try a search of your own at Google: http://www.google.com. (Note: This link will open a new browser window. Once you are ready to come back to the lesson, simply close the new browser window.)

There are many good search engines other than Google available. Some other search engines are:

Altavista: http://www.altavista.com
Hotbot: http://www.hotbot.com
AlltheWeb: http://www.alltheweb.com

There are also meta search engines which search all of the search engines. One good example of a metasearch engine is Metacrawler: http://www.metacrawler.com.

TASK: Use a search engine to find 5 Web sites that contain biographical information about President Abraham Lincoln. E-mail the URLs (Uniform Resource Locator: e.g, http://webinstituteforteachers.org) for these Web sites to your mentor.

For more search engines and metasearch engines see the Resources page of this module.

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