Search Engines

In the end, a search engine index contains links to all (or most) of the words on millions (or up to billions) of documents on the WWW.

When you use a search engine, it is not searching the WWW live. You type in the words you are searching for and the search engine searches its index (which could have been generated minutes or months ago) for those words. The search engine then returns a list of all the pages in its index that contain the words you typed.

So, search engines are powerful because where a subject directory will have a few million pages at best, current popular search engines have at least hundreds of millions of Pages.

Let's try a search on a search engine...