A search engine is a website that allows you to search through a huge list of web pages which it has made by going through the web itself and making a list.

They are useful because otherwise you would have to know the address of the site you are going to, or keep going from one web page to the next till you find it which would take a pretty long time!

So, if you live in Bolton and are dying for a curry you can just type the words 'Indian restaurant Bolton' to find relevant sites.

Search vs Directory

There are two different types of search sites, an engine and a directory.

Search engines just bring up a list of all the sites that match what you type in the search box.

They list the sites they think are the best matches at the top of the list. They can give you lists of thousands of sites but hopefully the one you want will be on the first page.

A directory is more like a guide to websites which records a few details about sites and orders them by subject.

It's a bit like the Yellow Pages but covers everything, not just shops.

There might be pages with lists of hairdressers ordered by town, or lists of shop catalogue companies grouped by what sort of clothes they sell.

You can still search through a directory just like a search engine, but you can also use a directory to just browse through by subject. Yahoo! is a famous directory style search.

What to do

In practice, with a search engine you just type in the thing you are looking for, like:

It will then show you a list (usually a long list) of pages on other websites that contain those two words.

Then you can simply follow the link from the search results to go to that page. Normally you just write a couple of keywords, for example, 'squash club' rather than whole sentences like: