People are wondering what exactly are search engines and how have they created a vast impact on the studying skills of its users? Search engine is a software system designed to search the Web for information and identify items in a database that match keywords specified by users. These are indispensable tools for finding web-based information, as well as a useful tool for students and teachers for writing academic documents and other purposes. In 1990, the first fundamental search engine called Archie was created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan, and J. Peter Deutsch, a computer science student at McGill University. A searchable database of file names on FTP sites has been generated. Since Archie was introduced before the Internet was decommissioned on a large scale, its database has some public file names to search manually. Archie evolved into Veronica and Jughead after the launch of the Gopher Protocol. It was created by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota in 1991. In this year to 1993, the web was starting to change. In response to this change, the World Wide Web Wanderer was created and launched by MIT student Matthew Gray. The Tramp was the first full-text crawler. This software system was a boot series used for searching and listing in the database called Wandex. It was considered the beginning of the modern search engines we use today (Admin, March 22, 2012). In 1998 there were two search engines before the introduction of Direct Hit, Alta Vista - author-controlled services and Look Smart - editor-controlled directories. Direct Hit used relevancy, which was based on hit ratio, and to calculate search engine rankings. Additionally, Google and Yahoo are search engines that use page ranking which monitors the number of...... middle of paper......rom http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tech nology/ internet/8639443 /Internet-search-engines-cause-poor-memory-scientists-claim.htmlGriffiths, J.R. and P. Brophy. 2002. Student Research Behavior in the JISC Information Environment. Ariadne 33. URL: http://www..ariadne.ac.uk/issue33/edner[viewed 20 January 2007]Association of College and Research Libraries. 2007. Information Literacy Proficiency Standards for Higher Education. Chicago. III.: American Library Association.URL: http://www.a-la.org/ala/acrl/acrlstandards/informationliteracycompetency.html [accessed August 28, 2007]Kammerer, Y., & Gerjets, P. (2014) . The role of search result location and source reliability in selecting web search results when using a list or grid interface. International Journal Of Human-Computer Interaction, 30(3), 177-191.doi:10.1080/10447318.2013.846790