Editing Search engine (computing) (section)

{{Short description|System to help searching for information}}
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In [[computing]], a '''search engine''' is an information retrieval software system designed to help find information stored on one or more [[computer system]]s. Search engines discover, crawl, transform, and store information for retrieval and presentation in response to user queries. The search results are usually presented in a list and are commonly called ''hits''. The most widely used type of search engine is a [[web search engine]], which searches for information on the [[World Wide Web]].

A search engine normally consists of four components, as follows: a search interface, a crawler (also known as a spider or bot), an indexer, and a database. The crawler traverses a document collection, deconstructs document text, and assigns surrogates for storage in the search engine index. Online search engines store images, link data and metadata for the document.