Search engines & metasearch engines

Search engines use 'robots' or 'spiders' to crawl the web looking for new webpages. These are then indexed and added to a database. The big search engines like Google, have very large databases indexing many millions of page, e.g., Google claims to index 4 billion pages (Feb 2004). It is easy to be overwhelmed by the number of results you get from a search engine search, so they are best used if you are looking for something quite specific.

Metasearch engines search across a number of search engines at one time. They can be useful places to start, but you need to keep your searches simple.