SENDING TO A CENTRAL INDEXING SITE META DATA OR SIGNATURES FROM OBJECTS ON A COMPUTER NETWORK

A search engine utilizes a bottom-up approach to index the content of a network instead of relying on atop-down approach as used by conventional search engines. The network being indexed may be any network, including the global computer network, Internet, and the world wide web. Instead of using a central site including spidering software to recursively search all linked web pages and generate a search index of the Internet, independent distributed components or agents are located at each web site and report meta data about objects at the web site to the central server. A central catalog of object references is compiled on the central site from the meta data reported from each web site. One or more brochures file may also be created and stored on each web site to provide conceptual or non-keyword data about the site, such as demographics and categorization information. This conceptual information is then utilized in constructing the central catalog so that more accurate search results may be generated for search queries applied to the catalog.