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Search bots: Computer programs which will search a dozen search engines simultaneously. Used by Meta search engines like Dog pile.

Search engine: A cgi program, which allows a visitor to search for words or phrases in a database of WebPages. The creator adds to the database by sending a program called a "spider" to follow links in WebPages.

Search engine algorithm: The criteria a search engine uses to determine which websites match the words or phrases a visitor is searching for.

Shopping bots: Computer programs that search commerce sites for the best deal. Also called rob shoppers, they'll find you the best deal on anything from cars to Palm Pilots.

Side door pages: Doorway Pages created to rank well on several search engines for one or more keyword phrases. They provide valuable content to the visitor, often in the form of an article.

Signature file: A small file you can create to add to the bottom of your email and newsgroup messages. Most email programs will allow you to create one fairly easily. For Netscape, create a file named .sig.txt in the default folder on your hard drive. Add your address, phone numbers, email address, URL, your company name, and/or a cute message. But keep it to four lines or less.

Source code: The HTML and Java programming of a web document. Look in your browser under View Source Code to look at a page's code. If their page does something nifty you want to copy, cut and paste their source code into a word processing program and save it.
SOV: Share Of Voice. How large a percent of a given niche or population a web or email property reaches.

SPAM: Unsolicited email. This term encompasses everything from those annoying jokes your friends send you to the multi-level marketing schemes appearing in your email box every day.

Spamdexing: Gathering email addresses from the Internet to create a database. The database of email addresses is then either used to send unsolicited marketing messages or sold to somebody else for that purpose.

Spider: A program, which follows links through websites to add or update a database (usually for a search engine, but spandexes have spiders too). They look at HTML code and add information their search engines will use to determine the page's relevance to keywords and phrases. They are text-based, and often can't follow frames.

Stemming: The ability of search engines to associate words with prefixes and suffixes to their word stem. If you have "water" on your website, the search engines with this ability will also associate "watering" and "watered" with your page.

Stock bots: Computer programs that will find stocks meeting your investment criteria. Consider them your completely impartial stock broker. You can program them to find companies you want to invest in, and alert you when a company's profile begins to drift away from your criteria.