What is a Search Engine?
What Does Search Engine Mean? A search engine is a service that allows Internet users to search for content via the World Wide Web (WWW). A user enters keywords or key phrases into a search engine and receives a list of Web content results in the form of websites, images, videos or other online data that semantically match with the search query. The list of content returned via a search engine to a user is known as a search engine results page (SERP). A search engine performs a number of steps to do its job. First a spider/web crawler trawls the web for content that is added to the search engine's index. These small bots can scan all sections and subpages of a website, including content such as video and images. Hyperlinks are parsed to find internal pages or new sources to crawl when they point to external websites. To help bots do their crawling work in a more efficient way, larger websites usually submit a special XML sitemap to the search engine that acts as a roadmap of the si...