search engine

The tool you use to find things online.

I’ve never understood why “they” — those mysterious naming-guys —  called this an engine. Makes it sound so complicated* and locomotive-like. Nevertheless, this is a very simple term. Think how time-consuming it would be to go through the Internet’s index like you do in the back of a textbook. So geniuses (I’m not kidding. They ARE geniuses.) came up with a way to sort the Entire Internet into huge indexes that will allow you to search the whole thing in miliseconds.

Try to imagine the sheer number of words online, then consider the number of languages there are on Earth. Also take into account the fact that there are new pages going online constantly all over the planet. It’s truly amazing.

There are three main search engines:
Google
Bing
Yahoo!

There are a lot of other search engines, but these are the most common.

Some facts about search engines:

– Google is the most popular search engine

– they all allow you to pay for advertising on them — usually you pay by the number of clicks you get on your site’s address

– BUT! they list your site for free — and contrary to what the robo callers say, the listing NEVER EXPIRES (although it does get stale)

– DON’T search for your own business. Each searcher gets different results based on that mysterious algorithm. So if you search for your own business, you’ll see different listings that someone else. Got that?

– search engines display the websites that are MOST relevant to what is being searched. So, if you call it Scotch tape and don’t find anything (unlikely), try cellophane tape.

*Search engines ARE complicated because they use sophisticated algorithms to present to the searcher the most relevant results.