Internet commerce is one of the fastest growing industries today. Thanks to the wide range of features offered by the Web, it is easier and cheaper for businesses to transact with other businesses. One factor that allows companies to find each other are search engines. Search engines are one of the reasons the Web is growing so quickly. Search engines have many capabilities, from using key words or phrases to find what you're looking for to using general statements to navigate the web. But what exactly is a search engine? Search engines are huge databases of web page files that have been assembled automatically by machine. There are two types of search engines. One type is the individual search engine. This type of search engine compiles its information into its database making it accessible when you use that particular engine. It does not use information from other engines to facilitate searches. Then there are the meta-searchers who don't have their own database. They simultaneously use a combination of information from individual search engines, from a single site and using the same interface. Meta searchers provide a quick way to find out which engines are fetching the best results in your search. There are two ways meta-researchers show their results. Most use a single list that displays search results from multiple engines in one merged list and removes any duplicate entries from the list. The second way they display results is through multiple lists. These are separate lists where they are displayed as received by each engine leaving duplicate entries in the list. Search engines are not very complex in the way they work. Every search engine sends spiders to bots across the web space going from link to link identifying as many pages as it can. After spiders arrive at a web page, they generally index all the words on that page which are publicly available pages on the site. They then store this information in their databases and when you perform a search it matches the keywords you searched for with the words on the page indexed by the spider. However, when you search the web using a search engine, you are not searching the entire web as is currently the case. You are looking at what spiders have indexed in the past.