They usually only represent a small portion of all sites on the Web. 2. Some search engines rank your results in order of relevance, defined by the frequency of your search words in the retrieved documents and their location in the documents. Search engines vary in the size of their databases of sites, how frequently they update, and the search options they offer. Each engine usually offers search help directly on their site. Often an asterisk may be used to stand for any string of letters.
Some search engines use parentheses, commas, or hyphens rather than quotation marks.
Often words do not have meaning unless they appear near each other in a document. With some engines, you type the operator NEAR to specify that two words appear close to one another. Some search engines like Infoseek allow you to specify case. This is useful in a search for the acronym AIDS, to avoid getting a hit on the word aids, or when seeking a name that is also a commonly used word such as Baker. The Internet is an international computer network made up of smaller networks.