Say it like this

A helper that already went and looked at nearly everything, so it can tell you where to go.

For the grown-up

A search engine crawls pages, records what is on them in an index, and ranks that index against a query. The speed comes from the looking having happened in advance. The consequences come from the ranking.

The easy mistake

Careful here. What appears first is a designed outcome, not a natural one. Somebody wrote the rules that decide the order, and being first is not the same as being right.

The full explanation

What Is a Search Engine?

A glossary entry is the short version. This one has the child explanation, the grown-up explanation, the questions and an activity.

Read it

Words next to this one

Website A place on the internet where somebody keeps their things so other people can come and look. Internet Computers talking to other computers. All of them, all over the world, all the time. Algorithm A list of steps for getting something done, written out so carefully that a machine can follow it. Browser The window you look at websites through. It goes and fetches the page, then shows it to you.