The Interactive Glossary: Defining the Net
Google
Google is the most popular search engine. It uses software programs called spiders that scour the Internet, analyzing billions of web pages, group and blog postings, and indexing all of the words. It also indexes audio and video.
Indexes like Google identify the text on individual pages of a website that match your search criteria, even if the site itself has nothing to do with what you are looking for. You can often find unexpected gems of information this way.
Search results are ranked in order of relevancy--the number of times your search term appears in a document--or how closely the document appears to match a concept you have entered.
