3. It sounds more modern than it is. Autonomy's software is based on the work of 17th century mathematician and cleric Thomas Bayes, whose work on probability allows Kenjin an intelligent take on the net.
4. Current search engines are one of two types. The first, such as AltaVista and Google, employs software to crawl spider-like across the web and "read" a large number of pages. When you type, for example, "chocolate" you get 190,000 pages it has found containing the word.
5. The second, such as Yahoo! - founded by chief Yahoos Jerry Yang and David Filo while at college - uses human editors to build a directory of the best sites on the net. You search using categories such as travel, sport and entertainment.
8. There was a time (in 1993-4) when you didn't need a search engine because all the sites in the world fitted on a single HTML page. The NCSA What's New Page would update you with new websites as they were built.
9. Now the net is bigger and there are a multitude of regional (which in web-speak means continental), speciality and kid-safe engines, all helpfully listed and explained on Danny O'Sullivan's Search engine watch.
10. But to get what you need to know on the net you sometimes have to go a little further, to the invisible web - and do a direct search to the ever growing number of online databases the search engines' software spiders never find.