Search Engine

A search engine is an information retrieval software system that discovers, crawls, indexes and stores information from one or more computer systems so that it can be retrieved in response to a user's query, most commonly as a ranked list of results called hits; the most widely used kind is the web search engine, which searches the World Wide Web. The idea of mechanizing information retrieval predates the web by decades, and the American engineer Vannevar Bush pursued it directly, taking part in MIT's INTREX project from 1965 to develop technology for mechanizing library information processing and arguing in his 1967 essay Memex Revisited that advances in digital computers, transistors and video had made such mechanization newly practical. Search engines built on these ideas have since become one of the primary ways people navigate and find information on the internet.