SE

A web page search engine indexes the content of web pages to create a list of pages that best match a search phrase. This type of search engine uses a program called a spider to read web pages and extract the content into a database. When a search is executed the engine looks through its database to create a matched page listing.

search engine scope

• External search engine
  Enables searching of pages/sites across multiple domains, i.e. Yahoo, AltaVista
• Internal search engine
  Search pages within a designated web site.

examples

• Inktomi
• Google