The document discusses search engines and their components. It provides a brief history of search engines including Archie, Google, and Yahoo. It then describes the key components of search engines such as web crawlers that retrieve web pages, an indexer that builds indexes of words on pages, and a search function that returns results based on user queries by matching them to indexes. The document also discusses Google's crawling architecture and how it indexes pages. Finally, it notes that most search engines are commercial and make money through advertising.