ABSTRACT
Search engines are amazing in their automation of the search process, because they deliver the results of several complex and difcult system functions in less than a second, consistently and with high quality. Like the dial tone always present when we pick up the phone, we take it for granted that in mere seconds we can execute a search and dive into results. Search engines like Google combine the spiders that crawl the Web, applications that capture text and images, many servers that store billions of pages, indexing that allows instant retrieval, and algorithms to serve up references in the order most probably useful to the user. These are all wondrous functions.
