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The Internet, and WWW, (World Wide Web), and its search engines, Google, Yahoo, and the recent Microsoft's Live Search, and others, have become so useful and so familiar, most of us would have a hard time living without them. How do they work? When did they begin? And what about the dot com bubble, what caused it to burst?

Search engines are tools for searching for information on the WWW (World Wide Web) and the Internet. Mainly they are of three parts, a program, a spider or a crawler that crawls the Internet picking up and sifting through web sites and pages.; a database that stores the information once it is collected; and a search tool that where users can type in requests. or key words.

The forerunner of search engines as we know and use them today, came about with Archie. Archie is short for Archives, or more descriptive ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) This type of information retrieval was new and was immensely popular. For the first time archived text could be sent from one computer to another.

Others followed, all doing pretty much the same thing, Veronica, Jughead, and Gopher. Gopher, the brain child of Mark McCahill of the University of Minnesota, was likewise a popular fetch option, and college students were entranced. Many jumped in and progress was made in technique and delivery. FTP was developed and is still in use today. It is a client-server program that uploads and downloads files and before WWW was the sole means of getting information to and from the Internet.

Then along came Tim Burner-Lee and WWW. He is associated with the W3W consortium, the standard bearer for everything concerning the hypertext protocol and the world wide web; also the largest catalog on the Internet, The Visual Library , is associated with him. And no one looked back.

In fact, there was so much media hype about the super highway that investors started buying on future speculations to the degree that this mania grew out of bounds. Lots of money was lost. Potential millionaires, and millionaires on paper, went back to day jobs when the bubble busted. Yet the world of information had changed forever. Pandora's Box was opened wide and secrets, good and bad, were out for everyone to grasp. The controversy over such continues today.

How do we interact with the Internet by way of search engines? First there's a query, key words are typed in a search box, then the search engines check for relevancy to other databases, put together a list based on keywords, and

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