Search Engines are one of the most popular methods of finding information in the 21st century. Gone are the days of opening an encyclopedia to find the answer to a question or skimming the yellow pages to locate a local specialist. Search engines are helping us tackle every conceivable problem that we happen to face in our daily life. Need to do research on the Civil War?

To start, let’s discuss how search engines work, without boring you with too much computer tech babble. Search engines consist of a number of very sophisticated software programs that gather and organize information from the internet. The first important program is called a “robot spider” that is used to index, or “find” pages posted on the internet. The search engine then uses an algorithm, or mathematical equation, to determine how important a web page is in relation to a particular word or phrase (referred to as keywords or keyword phrases.)