A search engine operates in the following order: Web crawling Indexing Searching Web search engines work by storing information about many web pages, which they retrieve from the HTML itself. These pages are retrieved by a Web crawler (sometimes also known as a spider) — an automated Web browser which follows every link on the site. Exclusions can be made by the use of robots.txt . The contents of each page are then analyzed to determine how it should be indexed (for example, words can be extracted from the titles,page content, headings, or special fields called meta tags ). Data about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. A query can be a single word. The purpose of an index is to allow information to be found as quickly as possible. Some search engines, such as Google , store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache ) as well as information about the web pages, whereas others, s...