How Do Search Engines Work

Search engines use automated software
programs knows as spiders or bots to survey
the web and build their databases. Web
documents are retrieved by these programs
and analysed.
Data collected from each web page are
then added to the search engine index. When
you enter a query at a search engine site,
your input is checked against the search engine's
index of all web pages it has analysed.
The best urls are then returned to you as hits,
ranked in order with the best results at the top.
---Aj