Tech Hampton Roads

In line at the Best Buy off Jefferson Avenue in Newport News, VA, I overheard someone explaining search engines to his friend. "A search engine is like Google or Yahoo!," the man said. "You type in keywords or phrases to find exactly what you want. It's the most specific dictionary you can imagine."

So Tidewater, what exactly is a search engine?

According to webopeida.com, a search engine is "a program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found."

The guy in line at Best Buy was pretty much on target. Google, Yahoo!, and MSN have been recognized as the best search engines, but there are many more. Powerset, a new search engine poised to out do all search engines, is linked up with Wikipedia, allowing users to search the web and Wikipedia at once.

A search engine is good for looking up anything. Some popular searches, such as computers or technology, have millions of results; however, a search for less popular items, such as Smithfield, VA, registers less than a million results.

But don't take my word for it. Have some fun and experiment with different search engines. Figure out which one works the best for you, and enjoy this terrific technology.