.

How is it that when you use a search engine (e.g. Google or Bing), they seem to know about all of the websites? In this video, Michael Pound talks about search engine spiders, tiny programs that crawl over the world wide web and find websites!

Talking points:

• Modern search engines store huge lists of all of the information spiders have found on websites. How many websites do you think there are? How big do you think this list might be?
• Can you think of some things on a website that might be useful to store, so that people who are searching can find it?
• Can you think of any things on a website that aren't useful?
• In our examples, we thought a website might be important if many other websites linked back to it. Can you think of any other ways to score websites that might work better than how many links point to them?

Resources:

• Worksheet: Can you be a web spider? [Link]