Its OK now.

I have my coke, I ate my twisties and I realise that to answer the question in the previous post I can say:

Web search engines are used to retrieve information on the world wide web. If I wanted to "Google" myself I would type into the Google search interface my name in inverted commas, "Leisa Gibbons". This will send information to Google's database of webpages and indexes and retrieve all entries that have those two words connected together as a phrase. The way these entries got into the database in the first place was because Google sends out a special bot or spider that collects information about webpages, including downloading copies of them, into their database. This is primarily done through hyperlinks from web page to web page. In order to find all the results of Googling "Leisa Gibbons" the Google database will present links to webpages the spider has found with my name in it. Currently there are 5 entries for "Leisa Gibbons" and two of them point to this blog. Thus the three elements of a search engine are; 1. the interface where the query is entered (Google search page); 2. the database in which information is stored (Google's database and cache); and 3. the spider or indexer that trawls the collected information (Google's spider which is deployed on the web).