How to get the most from search engines like AltaVista, Infoseek, Excite, Webcrawler, Lycos, HotBot, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves and the like. Web documents are retrieved and indexed. When you enter a query at a search engine website, your input is checked against the search engine's keyword indices. The best matches are then returned to you as hits. This is the most common form of text search on the Web.
Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords.
Essentially, this means that search engines pull out and index words that are believed to be significant. Words that are mentioned towards the top of a document and words that are repeated several times throughout the document are more likely to be deemed important. Some sites index every word on every page. Others index only part of the document. For example, Lycos indexes the title, headings, subheadings and the hyperlinks to other sites, along with the first 20 lines of text and the 100 words that occur most often.