Directories are quite often maintained by human editors who vet submitted sites and organise them into categories. Yahoo and Looksmart are well known examples of directories.Search engines consist of vast databases compiled of websites found using one of two methods. The first method is manual or automatic submission - when a web site administrator submits a site to the search engine.
The second method is by using search programmes referred to as spiders, crawlers or bots, which crawl the Internet, reading, recording and indexing content automatically, and then generate the search results from these databases. Examples are Google and AltaVista
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