What is a "search engine"?

What is a "search engine"?

Ethan Feerst and Dylan Stewart (Technology Therapist, Mac Guru) gives expert video advice on: What is a "search engine"?; What is the difference between "upload" and "download"?; What is "spam"? and more...

A search engine is the librarian of the internet. Search engines grew out of a combination of small programming technologies that allowed little spiders and bots and crawlers to go out on the internet and do searching and indexing for various kinds of information. Of course this has now been perfected by our boys at Google and Yahoo! and different companies that have now brought these services into an easy portal for us to make use of. But behind the scenes of these search engines, there's crawlers and bots and spiders and all kinds of little cybernetic animals that are constantly combing through the internet and looking at keywords on different sites and indexing different references and cross-referencing things and figuring out how many sites are pointing to Joe and how many sites is Joe pointing to and they're rating these things and indexing them constantly.