Search engines make use of "robots", "spiders", "crawlers", and various other computer programs that trace hyperlinks across the Web. While such "robots" cruise from one site to the next, they index Web documents and send the results back to a database. When a search term is introduced, an enormous database is checked and the results are presented in a list. Because there is so much information available on the Web, these results may amount to several thousand so-called "hits".
This is no problem if what you are looking for is presented among the first 30 or so hits. If this is not the case, most users give up, and the result of thousands of hits actually amounts to zero: no result.
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This file prepared and presented as an aid to help students understand the web. Send questions or comments to Royce Shook