A search engine is software designed to find appropriate items in a large database or data corpus suhc as a document store. based on user queries, that are often of a semi-structured form. Examples include web search, bibligraohic search, and image search. In some cases a ''good enough' set of results, is sufficint, for example if you are looking for photos of beaches in general to use in a brochure. In other cases it is important that the search returns all relevant results. Typically there may be some ranking of relevance or importance. Search engines often allow full-text search or equivakent for other medias as opposed to simply databse queries that are focused proncipally on specific field values, but the distinction has been reducing. For small corpora a search engine can somply scan the complete dataset for each query, but more often the serach engine creates and maintains some form of index of the dataset it is searching.
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