World Wide Web series: Part 3 - Search engines on the Internet

The key to finding relevant information on the Internet is the ability to use various search engines. A search engine is a software program that takes a search query from the user and finds information on numerous servers on the Internet using the query. The relevance of a particular Web site to the search query is also determined by a search engine. A search engine interprets the composition of the search query, finds matching words from sites and ranks the returned items in terms of relevance. Although most search engines perform keyword searches, whereby words in a search query are matched, some accommodate concept search, whereby words in a search query are interpreted as close to the words on Web sites.