1. Spiders (software) search for documents and web pages.
2. Spiders analyze each page.
4. This software takes the info from these sources and puts them in a database.
5. The user searches using the search engine query box.
6. Database searches for matching info, the most relevant pages (according to the spiders) are shown first.
7. The user gets a list of matching results with info about each page and links to pages