What Is A Search Engine Anyway?

Simply put, a search engine is a computer program that retrieves documents, files or data from a database and returns the results to web browsers looking for information.

Search engines are designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files.

The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits.

The hits are retrieved for the user using criteria supplied by the searcher. These criteria are referred to as keywords. The hits are the documents or pages returned that contain the specified keywords.

An example of a keyword is 'backlinks', a keyword phrase is a series of words like 'getting backlinks' or 'blog commenting'.

A search engine search is referred to as a 'search query' or 'query' and is capable of returning references to relevant information resources in response to the query. The returned search query is also referred to as a 'search result'.

Popular search engines include google.com, yahoo.com, bing.com (formerly msn.com) and askjeeves.com.