===Search Engine===

A Web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called hits. The information may consist of web pages, images, information and other types of files. Some search engines also mine data available in newsbooks, databases, or open directories. Unlike Web directories, which are maintained by human editors, search engines operate algorithmically or are a mixture of algorithmic and human input.

The World Wide Web (commonly abbreviated as "the Web") is a very large set of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. With a Web browser, one can view Web pages that may contain text, images, videos, and other multimedia and navigate between them using hyperlinks. Using concepts from earlier hypertext systems, the World Wide Web was begun in 1992 by the English physicist Sir Tim Berners-Lee, now the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and Robert Cailliau, a Belgian computer scientist, while both were working at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, they proposed building a "web of nodes" storing "hypertext pages" viewed by "browsers" on a network,[1] and released that web in 1992. Connected by the existing Internet, other websites were created, around the world, adding international standards for domain names & the HTML language. Since then, Berners-Lee has played an active role in guiding the development of Web standards (such as the markup languages in which Web pages are composed), and in recent years has advocated his vision of a Semantic Web. Cailliau went on early retirement in January 2005 and left CERN in January 2007.
The World Wide Web enabled the spread of information over the Internet through an easy-to-use and flexible format. It thus played an important role in popularising use of the Internet,[2] to the extent that the World Wide Web has become a synonym for Internet, with the two being conflated in popular use.

3 TYPe of seArch ENginE

==Altavista==

AltaVista is an Internet search engine company, and that company's search engine product.AltaVista was created by researchers at Digital Equipment Corporation's Western Research Laboratory who were trying to provide services to make finding files on the public network easier.[1] Although there is some dispute about who was responsible for the original idea[2], two key participants were Louis Monier, who wrote the crawler, and Michael Burrows, who wrote the indexer. The name AltaVista was chosen in relation to the surroundings of their company at Palo Alto. AltaVista was publicly launched as an internet search engine on 15 December 1995 at altavista.digital.com.[3][4]
At launch, the service had two innovations which set it ahead of the other search engines. It used a fast, multi-threaded crawler (Scooter) which could cover a lot more Web pages than were believed to exist at the time and an efficient search back-end running on advanced hardware. As of 1998, it used 20 multi-processor machines using DEC's 64-bit Alpha processor. Together, the back-end machines had 130 GB of RAM, 500 GB of hard disk space, and received 13 million queries per day.[5] This made AltaVista the first searchable, full-text database of a large part of the World Wide Web. The distinguishing feature of AltaVista was its minimalistic interface compared with other search engines of the time; a feature which was lost when it became a portal, but was regained when it refocused its efforts on its search function.
AltaVista's site was an immediate success. Traffic increased steadily from 300,000 hits on the first day to more than 80 million hits a day two years later. The ability to search the web, and AltaVista's service in particular, became the subject of numerous articles and even some books.[6] AltaVista itself became one of the top destinations on the web, and by 1997 would earn US$50 million in sponsorship revenue.

==Dogpile==

Dogpile is an Infospace service that has improved dramatically over the years. As a "meta search" engine, Dogpile searches other search engines, and returns cream-of-the-crop results in one combined list. What's even better, Dogpile also provides guiding search suggestions ("clustering results") to the user, which is very helpful when doing initial research on a new topic.
"A nice change from Google and Yahoo". "The sponsored links are deceptive... you have to look closely". Dogpile is excellent. Too bad about the visual imagery that goes with its name.

==HotBOt==

HotBot is one of the early Internet search engines and was launched in May 1996 as a service of Wired Magazine. It was launched using a "new links" strategy of marketing, claiming to update its search database more often than its competitors. It also offered free webpage hosting, but only for a short time, and it was taken down without any notice to its users. Though competitive when it was acquired by Lycos in 1998, HotBot has in recent years reduced its scope. Today the website is merely a front end for third-party search engines Yahoo.com, and MSN, as well as Lycos' own lyGo.com. It was one of the first search engines to offer the ability to search within search results. The site still exists, however it is run by Yahoo! mainly.

===Kartoo===

KartOO is a French-based meta search engine, and a delightful twist on searching! Although lacking in database size, KartOO shines with its graphical presentation. By using a visual "mindmap" to display its results, users can see how keywords branch out to specific hits. You can even customize how the map displays on your screen! If you're not in a hurry to do your searching, then try this beautiful Flash interface!::"Very cool!". "I love the mindmapping". "Excellent graphics". : KartOO is building a niche for itself. Watch for this service to become big within 3 years