Anyone know how search engines work?

If you go to a search engine like Google for example and type in "pentium", it gives you a list of every document or website on the internet that contains that word. It does this in a split-second. Does anyone know how it manages to search through the entire WWW in that space of time?

A web crawler program searches the internet and returns sites with keywords to the central database, which is then used to do the search.

So the searching is done all the time and when you type in the word you want , the results come from the database not the web?

try here

found it by doing a search on google for Search Engines! Go figure! :D

Yep, it's all from the central database. As the linkDrakkenKorin posted pointed out, engines like Yahoo! also rely on people telling them to add their web page - but Yahoo! also bases its search off of Google which uses a web crawler.

That database is updated very often too.

So, how does it search that database so rapidly?

bubble sort... lol.

With a 14.4 modem to send the results back to you in a hurry.