Say you are looking for sites about depression glass. It is enough to send you into a catatonic fit. However, there are some ways to use search engines to your advantage and actually find what you want.
Search engines are basically searchable databases of site information gathered from the web.
Given the huge number of sites on the web, it's impossible for humans to manually scavenge for new ones. Depending on how the spider is programmed to record information, addresses of websites are usually filed based on title and the first few words of each page. About the only human element in this process comes when some of these sites are indexed according to categories in a webguide, which is often found in the opening page of a search engine. It covers major search engines such as Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Excite as well as specialized ones such as Deja News, for searching Usenet newsgroups, and Four11, the email and telephone directory. Most, however, let the user start a search using keywords and phrases.