A robot of another kind is alive and well on the Internet. It works day and night and can garner data by the gigabytes. A search engine is a computer program that will search those documents for the ones which contain the keywords of interest to you. And to make it all the more surreal, the knowbot allows you to retrieve and examine each document with just a mouse click. In an information-driven society and economy, it is information about information that reigns supreme.
Information retrieval is then the skill of the age.
The search machines are at our beck and call in our quest for the Holy Grail of information. So far, so good. But there are so many search engines that it is all quite bewildering. A good beginning is to realize there is more than one type of search engine. These search engines do not have their own information databases.