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Search Engines and Directories

Search engines like Google, Anzwers and Hotbot are enormous databases created and maintained by "robots" or "spiders" continually browsing WWW pages and indexing the words used in those pages. Web pages are included in these search engines in two ways - the creator or owner of the page can submit the URL, or the "spider" will find the page by following a link from another page.

There are usually two levels of searching: Simple and Advanced. The Advanced Query allows Boolean logic and features like Results Ranking, search by location and date indexed, which can be very useful in refining your search.

It is worth getting to know one or two search engines well by reading the help pages provided.

Points to remember when using search engines are:

• if no one submits a web page and it isn't linked to by another page, that web page will not be included in that database
• every different search engine has a different database so gives different results
• pages which change frequently will often have changed since the page was indexed
• many search engines only index the first part of a web page
• if the web site uses frames the contents of the web may not be indexed by the search engines
• the author of the page may not have thought to use the same words that you use to search e.g. many Adelaide sites do not have the word Adelaide
• text only (not images) is indexed
• computers are not selective. Search engines will include many useless and offensive sites as well as extremely useful and worthwhile sites.
• some WWW authors include spurious keywords to get their pages near the top
• an increasing number of search engines include paid links at the top of the search results