Search Engines are the World Wide Web's equivalent of a library catalog. However, because of the enormous size of the Web, no search engine includes everything that is on the Web. Just as there are different ways to search for a book in the library, there are different ways to locate resources on the internet.
Directory search engines such as Yahoo! allow you to look for a topic by standardized words that describe what you're looking for, such as 'taxes' or 'recipes.' They also provide a subject-based list that you can browse.
Full-text search engines are a little more difficult to work with. Every occurrence of the word that the search engine has found is listed, regardless of context. More words must be added to narrow the search. If you type in only the word 'pumpkin' when you are looking for information on growing pumpkins, you will also retrieve fairy tales, holidays, rock groups, recipes and paint colors. Hint: you can usually search for a phrase by putting the words in quotation marks. "pumpkin pie" would find only pages with that phrase and would ignore other occurrences of the word pumpkin.
MetaSearch engines search the contents of other search engines and organize them for you. They can produce too many results to work with if your query is not specific enough.