search engine (redirected from Search service)

search engine: see Internet, the.

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search engine

Tool for finding information, especially on the Internet or World Wide Web. Search engines are essentially massive databases that cover wide swaths of the Internet. Most consist of three parts: at least one program, called a spider, crawler, or bot, which “crawls” through the Internet gathering information; a database, which stores the gathered information; and a search tool, with which users search through the database by typing in keywords describing the information desired (usually at a Web site dedicated to the search engine). Increasingly, metasearch engines, which search a subset (usually 10 or so) of the huge number of search engines and then compile and index the results, are being used.

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Software that searches for data based on some criteria. Although search engines have been around for decades, they were brought to the forefront after the Web exploded onto the scene. Every Web search engine site uses a search engine that it has either developed itself or has purchased from a third party. Search engines can differ dramatically in the way they find and index the material on the Web, and the way they search the indexes from the user's query.

Although a search engine is technically the software and algorithms used to perform a search, the term has become synonymous with the Web site itself. For example, Google is a major search site on the Web, but rather than being called the "Google search site," it is commonly known as the "Google search engine." See Web search engines, vertical search engine, organic search, search engine optimization and social search engine.

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(World-Wide Web, tool, information science)

search engine - A remotely accessible program that lets you do keyword searches for information on the Internet. There are several types of search engine; the search may cover titles of documents, URLs, headers, or the full text. A list of search engines, Centre Universitaire d'Informatique at the University of Geneva