What is a Search Engine?

As the Web has grown and become increasingly unruly, search engines like AltaVista and Webcrawler have been created to meet the demand for finding specific information quickly. Using a search engine, you can type in a keyword or phrase, and within seconds the engine will search its database to find relevant sites. You can also browse through a search engine's subject directory, narrowing categories with each click. As you will learn, this is not always the best form of searching. In the next section, we show you a few pointers to improve your search results dramatically.