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Exactly what is a search engine?

Basically, a search engine is a software program that searches for sites based on the words that you designate as search terms.
Search engines look through their own databases of information in order to find what it is that you are looking for.

Are Search Engines and Directories The Same Thing?

Search engines and directories are not the same thing; although the term "search engine" often is used interchangeably.
Search engines automatically create web site listings by using spiders that "crawl" web pages, index their information, and optimally follows that site's links to other pages.
Spiders return to already-crawled sites on a pretty regular basis in order to check for updates or changes, and everything that these spiders find goes into the search engine database.

To learn more about what a subject directory is, read my article titled What is a Web Directory.

How Do Search Engines Work?
Please note:
Search engines are not simple.
They include incredibly detailed processes and methodologies, and are updated all the time.
This is a bare bones look at how search engines work to retrieve your search results. All search engines go by this basic process when conducting search processes, but because there are differences in search engines, there are bound to be different results depending on which engine you use.

The searcher types a query into a search engine.
Search engine software quickly sorts through literally millions of pages in its database to find matches to this query.
The search engine's results are ranked in order of relevancy.

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