Distinction between Databases and Web Pages

One of the problems when using the Web is that many people fail to make the distinction between databases that index journals and magazines versus information that is available via WWW homepages. One of the reasons for this is the fact that the majority of databases can be accessed via the Internet while information contained on a Web page is created by individuals or organizations. This information may not be as reliable as magazines or journal articles.

Search Engines

A search engine is a 'window' to information and sites located on the World Wide Web. Technically, a search engine is a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found.

What are you really searching?

Finding the Web documents (a.k.a. Web "pages" or "sites") you want can be easy or seem impossibly difficult. This is in part due to the sheer size of the WWW, currently estimated to contain 3 billion documents. It is also because the WWW is not indexed in any standard vocabulary. Unlike a library's catalogs, in which can use standardized Library of Congress subject headings to find books in most large, general libraries in the U.S., in Web searching you are always guessing what words will be in the pages you want to find or guessing what subject terms were chosen by someone to organize a web page or site covering some topic.

When you do what is called "searching the Web," you are NOT searching it directly. It is not possible to search the WWW directly. The Web is the totality of the many web pages which reside on computers (called "servers") all over the world. Your computer cannot find or go to them all directly. What you are able to do through your computer is access one or more of many intermediate search tools available now. You search a search tool's database or collection of sites -- a relatively small subset of the entire World Wide Web.

The search engine or tool provides you with hypertext links with URLs to other pages. You click on these links, and retrieve documents, images, sound, and more from individual servers around the world. There is no way for anyone to search the entire Web, and any search tool that claims that it offers it all to you is distorting the truth.

Types of Search Engines