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What is the difference between a browser and a search engine?

Posted By : of Data Doctors on June 17, 1999

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I have never known the difference between a browser and a search engine. And I never cared. But, over time, I developed a pre-conceived notion that the browser gets you to the ISP, and is also involved in formatting text etc. And that the search engine , (after you're on the ISP), gets you to your selected choice of info. Wrong or right?

Also, I'm on AT&T and they offer IE4.0 as the browser. I upgraded to IE5.0 later on. Now I loaded Encyclopaedia Brittannica and they say it uses 4.0. I know I must ask EB, but, did EB find 5.0 and not load 4.0? Yeah, sorry, I'll call EB. Thanks for great show!!! Mike Gabriel Tucson, AZ

This question was answered on June 17, 1999. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.


You are very close, don't forget though that the browser finds the pages and displays them after the search engine has displayed what it has found based on your search criteria Below please find some FYI definitions We are glad you enjoy the show! Keep listening!

Browser-Short for Web browser, a software application used to locate and display Web pages The two most popular browsers are Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer Both of these are graphical browsers, which means that they can display graphics as well as text In addition, most modern browsers can present multimedia information, including sound and video, though they require plug-ins for some formats

Search Engine-A program that searches documents for specified keywords and returns a list of the documents where the keywords were found Although search engine is really a general class of programs, the term is often used to specifically describe systems like Alta Vista and Excite that enable users to search for documents on the World Wide Web and USENET newsgroups

Typically, a search engine works by sending out a spider to fetch as many documents as possible Another program, called an indexer, then reads these documents and creates an index based on the words contained in each document Each search engine uses a proprietary algorithm to create its indices such that, ideally, only

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Posted by of Data Doctors on June 17, 1999

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