I've never liked the term 'search engine'. If something has big shiny wheels and runs on rails, or if it drives the tyres that erode roads, then that's an engine. Piston broke is the sort of terminology I associated with engines, not the sobering wealth of information churned out by Internet so-called search engines. But the term has caught on, and now even our local parish newsletter offers a quick guide to search engines, alongside details of the latest campaign to complain about cracks in the pavement. It can't be long before 'search engine' appears in Volume 7 of the Camford Shorter Concise Abbreviated Dictionary, so I'd better learn to use the term.
Search engines are of course fantastically useful ways of finding information.
It might not be the information you wanted, but what the heck, this is the Internet, not the British Library catalogue. Some of us can remember being impressed by Archie and Veronica, so it's a bit unfair to criticise services that are a thousand times better. So it's no wonder that people like search engines. Yet you never hear anyone enthuse about browse engines. It's a phrase I'd never heard until I started this article, so it needs a bit of explaining.