The document discusses search engines. It defines a search engine as software that searches the World Wide Web and presents results in a search engine results page. Examples provided are Google and Bing. Search engines are important because they filter the vast amount of information on the internet to provide relevant results quickly. There are different types of search engines including crawler-based like Google that use bots, directories that are human-curated, hybrids that combine both, and meta search engines that search multiple other engines.