A popular search engine with the largest database on the web, indexing more than 140 million pages. Its main URL is http://www.altavista.com. Until 1998, this search engine provided the search facilit [..]

A small program, often written in Java, which usually runs in a web browser, as part of a web page. It is possible that the use of such a program may cause spiders and robots to stop indexing a page.

A meta search engine which can be asked questions in English. This service is also in use at Altavista. http://www.askjeeves.com.

See Gateway Page.

Strictly, any program which handles its input and output data according to the CGI standard. In practice, CGI programs are used to handle forms and database queries on web pages, and to produce non-st [..]

Lists of links to selected (and usually popular) web sites. The links are maintained by search engines and directories and are sorted into categories or channels. Sites are picked by a channel editor, [..]

A computer, program or process which makes requests for information from another computer, program or process. Web browsers are client programs. Search engine spiders are (or can be said to behave as) [..]

The hiding of page content. Normally carried out to stop page thieves stealing optimized pages. See also Bait-and-Switch. Clustering

The HTML <!-- and --> tags are used to hide text from browsers. Some search engines ignore text between these symbols but others index such text as if the comment tags were not there. Comments a [..]

See Spider.