SEARCHING ON THE INTERNET 

A vast array of databases and services are available through the Internet. It is necessary to design interfaces that help users who search for information sources and services available on the Internet. This is because retrieval is recognised to be a complex and significant problem on the Internet. The reason for this is that the databases mounted on the net are in a wide variety of different formats, and different search retrieval software packages mounted on different computers and are providing access via different interfaces to subsets of the databases. 

Tools used for, searching the Internet often operate in client/server mode-Server software which enables the user to search the database in a more intuitive way has been set up on many computers on the Internet. The user's local system runs the equivalent client software which  communicates with the server software and provides a homogeneous interface to the data. In other words, the user does not need to know where the data is stored or how to manage the server system's file store structure.