About Search Engines

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

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

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