The search engine has become quite a valuable tool for the online user today. Without it, it may be very difficult for the user to scour through millions and even billions of websites today that are contained in this vast online world that it would be virtually impossible for one to really acquire any data needed. The Internet has grown into an immense source of information, quite a departure from its early days where only a privileged few have access to a comparably manageable amount of information.

But today is a different story. The Internet has become a gigantic repository of information spanning the whole globe. The amount of information that it contains can range from billions and billions of web pages that contain data that may or may not be useful to the ordinary user. How one will be able to separate what type of information is required and how they can be acquired is the job of the search engine.

A search engines is simply an information retrieval system that is designed to help users find information contained in a computer network such as the Internet. They can also be used to help companies source through information contained in their own database which can also grow to incredible amounts in due time. What users do is make a query by typing in a word or group of words that best describes the type of information that the user is looking for. The search engine then works to look for and retrieve the type of data that meets the criteria that the user inputs.

Different search engines work depending on the search algorithms they are designed with. Some search engines can list up search results to some measure of relevance or importance to the search query made. There are others that simply try to search for data that contains the search word or words typed in by the user. In any case, search engines try to help make searching for data easier for the user.

But on the Internet, search engines have to scour through billions and billions of web pages before they can get the type of information that the user is looking for. In most online search engines, they work by first storing information contained in the millions and millions of web pages online. Such search engines are usually text based and only store information contained on the web pages in their text form. The information contained in these pages is retrieved by what is known as a web crawler or spider. After the spider has gone through a web page, the contents are then indexed according to their relevance and category by means of several methods. Some search engines indexed web pages by means of extracting keywords or from the page titles, headings or any other means. This provides the search engines with the means to look over indexed pages and check for relevance of information that matches every search query or criteria a user tries to input into the search engine itself. The usefulness of the search engine would depend on how effective it is to provide relevant search results that are up to the user's expectations.