Your web visitor will fill out your search form, submitting the information to the Search Engine. Usually, you'll use a Search Form published by the program, but you may want to customize your form.

When Search Engine performs a search, it checks for files in the directories of the categories that are being searched.

The program looks for any files that meet all the restrictions for the categories selected, as well as several restrictions which can be defined in the Setup Options. Search Engine then checks to see if it has an up-to-date cached summary of the file, if it doesn't the program analyzes the file and saves a summary for next time. Because the program won't have any cached summaries when you first perform a search, the search will take much longer the first time.

When all the files have been searched, or the program has reached the Max Search Results as defined in the Setup Options, the results of the search will be cached so the search doesn't have to be performed again when the user wants to view the next page of results.