What is a Search Engine? Search engines are the primary tools of Internet users for finding products, services and information over the web. Search engines allow people to search the entire Web (or at least those pages of the Internet that are in the search engine's database.) How Does a Search Engine Index Web Pages? There are four parts to an engine that you need to know about for optimization purposes: • The spider is a program that goes out across the internet, looks for and gathers up web pages. • The database is where the spider will store the pages that it finds. • The search engine website, e.g. google.com, is where searchers go to pull up information from the database. • The algorithms are programs that determine which sites will come up when searchers type in a query at the search engine website. There are two ways that your site can get into the database: • The spider will automatically find your site from a link on someone else's site which is the path we recommend if you can get 1 or more quality inbound link(s). • You submit your URL so that the spider will come out and find it. What Happens When I Submit my URL to a Search Engine?