About Search Engines

Search engines are handy tools that help you find what you want on the Web.

Each search engine uses software (called spiders or robots) to compile a database of pages found on the publicly accessible Web. When you enter a search, the search engine scans its own database to match your terms against terms in its database records.

So, each search engine searches the part of the Web it has collected--not the whole Web--and each search engine has a somewhat different database.