### How Internet Searching Works

No one organization owns or controls the Internet. While this makes for an enviable degree of freedom to publish what you want, it makes it hard to find things, because there is no central list of everything on the Internet. In a very real sense, no one in the world knows where everything is on the Internet!

Fortunately, some organizations have made great strides towards cataloguing the contents of the Internet. In 1993, Carnegie-Mellon University created a "Web spider," a software "robot" that could travel from point to point on the World Wide Web and remember everywhere it had been. Carnegie-Mellon used this robot to create a vast World Wide Web index called Lycos (after Lycosidae, a variety of spider), and to this day continues to employ it to expand and improve the Lycos index as the Internet grows.

When you type a word, phrase, or Internet address into the "Searching The Internet" text box and click Search, the words you have entered are sent to a computer at Carnegie-Mellon which maintains the Lycos index. This computer searches the index and returns a "report" consisting of the pages it knows about that match what you typed in. The report includes an Internet shortcut for each page, so you can visit the pages it found with a single click!

Click here to return to "Search The Internet."