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 group of pages that share one address on the internet. 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.