The Quarterbacks - Habits for Effective Web Searching Search Engines in Brief Search engines are basically searchable databases of URLs. The nature of these databases and the behavior of search engines are changining all the time. Most databases get thier information from robots.
Robots are the workhorses of the search engines.
They work tirelessly, searching the web for new resources. A robot is a small computer program that knows how to do one particular task or set of tasks. Many search engnes use robots , or variations of them known as 'spiders,' to roam the web, and gather information about what it finds. It's important to note that robots only send back information about a page , and not the actual page itself. Another important fact is that robots behavior can vary between search engines, meaning they will report varying types of information about a page.