a program or web site that permits users to search for keywords on web pages throughout the World Wide Web.
a computer program that searches through large amounts of text or other data. For example, a search engine for the World Wide Web can be accessed at www.yahoo.com or at www.google.com.
Some people pay large amounts of money to try to get their web sites listed on search engines. This is unnecessary because every search engine's job is to find all possible web sites by itself, and major search engines gladly accept additional web addresses from anyone whowants to submit them. Search engine operators do not take kindly to attempts to manipulate the system by listing a web site dishonestly to generate more hits (see meta tag Google whacking.
computer program that has the capability of searching through large volumes of text or other data for specified keywords and then returning a list of files or documents where the keywords were found. Search engines help users track down on-line information on a wide variety of topics and are valuable on-line sources of secondary data.
