A Robot uses a software program to search, catalog, and then organize information on the Internet. Organization of data can be completed in a number of ways—including through a harvester, robot, spider, wanderer, and worm—and employing diverse ways of searching Websites to gather data.

Directory search engines do not search on the Internet for information but rather obtain it from individuals who enter it into the search engineÂ’s database. Because each Directory has its own means to categorize information, multitudes of them exist.

In March 2005, Google, Inc., a popular search engine, released its first official version of its free software for finding information stored on computer hard drives. The software scours hard drives for information contained in Adobe AcrobatÂ’s portable document format (known as PDF), and it scours music, video files, and email content.

On Saturday, May 7, 2005, the Google, Inc. search engine went down from 6:45 p.m. until 7:00 pm. Eastern Time. Google spokesman David Krane said that the problem was not a crack attack, as many people thought, but a problem related to the DNS or Domain Name System. He did not elaborate.

See Also: Bot or Robot; Domain Name System (DNS); Internet.