A Search Site or Search Engine is a web site that acts
as a catalog of the World Wide Web. A person can go to a Search Site
and look up a topic or find a web site using keywords, phrases, or
in some cases by typing a question.
Search Sited collect web pages in three ways:
- Through Submissions - a person submits the address of a website
to a search engine
- Manually - people browse the web collecting and reviewing sites
- Robots - special Web programs that automatically collect site
addresses and descriptions.
Search Sites build Indexes that list site addresses,
associated keywords, and descriptions. When a person goes to the site
and types in a keyword, software running on the Search Site takes
the keyword, compares it to the Index, then lists sites that match
the keyword.
The Index is built using web page titles, text found
on the web page, or special "invisible" code web page developers
include with their pages.
There are hundreds of Search Sites, but they all can
be placed into three categories:
Search Directory, Search Index, or Meta Index.
A list of Search Sites can be found in Section 7.
Section 4 discusses Search Directories.
Section 5 discusses Search Indexes.
Section 6 discusses Meta Indexes.
Before we begin to learn how to search, we first need
to look at Keywords.
