The Computer Dictionary

Search Engine

The search engine is the most popular online information resource. In pure form gathers all of its information by using some form of automated software, called "spiders" (also robots, bots, or crawlers). Spiders roam the Internet looking for new websites to index into their database.

The "spiders" typically analyze each new site they come across by inspecting certain parts of the site for ranking, and presenting some text from the site as a digest. Search engines employ a small staff to control this automated spider process. Nowadays, because of the inherent weakness in this system, search engines now commonly import results from a directory to balance their results.

See Directory

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