The Internet is a veritable smorgasbord of information, where you can find everything you wanted to know on just about anything. There are millions of pages existing on the web and billions more being posted everyday. How do you ever find what you are looking for? Without using a search engine, seeking for information you want from the World Wide Web is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Search engines can be used to find anything on the Internet- from interactive inter-state driving maps to finding the best yoga therapy schools in your area, from still images to video movies.

How search engines work

Search engines employ software programs commonly known as spiders or crawlers to discover new sites. This information is sent back to the main site where it is indexed. Different search engines differ in how comprehensively and quickly they carry out the necessary search.

As a rule, most search engines pay more attention to words that appear towards the start of the document as well as words that appear frequently all through the document. This is simply because the spiders focus on key words that appear to be significant.

When keyword searches do not work

While using keywords is one of the most efficient ways of doing an Internet search, it does have a few drawbacks.

Keyword searches are unable to distinguish between words that have different meanings but are spelled the same way such as a hard drive, hard work or a hard rock.

Keyword searches are unable to include other words that mean the same and would actually enhance your search. If you did a search on pulmonary disease, the search would not come up with documents that had the word ‘lung' instead of ‘pulmonary'. This means you would not have access to valuable information.

On some search engines, a keyword search would differentiate lower case from upper case, eliminating even more results based on mere capitalization of words.