What is a Search Engine? the answer is easy, a search engine offers the facility to search the internet for content based on a few search criteria.

In a way, searching the internet is a bit like searching for a needle in a haystack, when there are millions of different kinds of needles in the haystack. You find what you're looking for, but you know there is more information out there probably more relavent to what you're looking for.

The way most search engines have worked in the past, is they read the description and key words list in the web page, and categorise it and perhaps then follow any links in the page. Newer search engines, such as Google operate by also categorising the importance of a website by the number of links to it from other websites.

It's an art form, creating a process to efficiently categorise and log a global resource of web pages and key words. To be technical for a moment, it's about 'Recall' and 'Precision', or quantity over quality. High quantity (recall) of web pages will perhaps yeld a list of lower quality pages (precision) than you're actually looking for. A more detailed search will reduce the quantity of pages with your search criteria, but perhaps raise the quality of sites found. It has been the mission of search engines for many years to try to have a high recall, and high precision at the same time.

Back to the non-technical, most search engine web sites also have a directory of links to companies and services. Companies would have paid to have their links added to this directory.

If you want to find a list of search engines, try entering it into a search engine! ... here's a couple to choose from.

www.google.com - www.google.co.uk
www.teoma.com
www.altavista.com
www.yahoo.co.uk - www.yahoo.com
www.lycos.co.uk
search.msn.com
www.directhit.com

One search engine I haven't mentioned, is yourself. Most companies now have a website. After you have read the page on website addresses (here), try the obvious ones. Looking for the website for Dixons? try the obvious ... type in www.dixons.co.uk, or perhaps www.dixons.com. What about Sainsbury, try www.sainsbury.co.uk, or www.sainsbury.com. What about Marks & Spencer?

Any luck? if you're not finding what you want, try variations on the name, remember these companies want to be found!

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