This document discusses search engines, providing definitions and explaining their purpose, workings, history, and types. It defines a search engine as software that searches a database and gathers related information to specified search terms. It describes how search engines work by using bots to index web pages and how they return relevant results based on algorithms. The history outlines key early search engines from the 1990s like Archie and more recent developments in ranking algorithms and paid search advertising. In closing, it categorizes search engines as crawler-based, directories, hybrid, or meta search engines.