Search Engines

Ok what all this really means is this - Search Engines have huge databases or warehouses of information. You can look for all the things in that warehouse which match a word or set of words. I generally like to think of a Search Engine like the index of a book. An index will tell you where in the book a word occurs, but it usually doesn't provide you with any context. For example, it will say world wide web, page 92, but it won't say if it's going to define the web, tell you how to search it, tell you about the history of the web, etc.

Advantages:
- Full-text searching of selected Web pages (in most cases)
- Search by keyword, trying to match exactly the words in the pages
- Their databases are generally much larger than subject guides

Disadvantages:
- Limited browsing, no subject categories
- Databases compiled by "spiders" (computer-robot programs) with minimal human oversight
- Search-Engine size: from small and specialized to a large percentage of the indexable Web
- You sometimes turn up "garbage" hits. Hits that come up because the word you searched on somehow appeared on the site.