Search engine indexing is the collecting, parsing, and storing of data to facilitate fast and accurate information retrieval. Index design incorporates interdisciplinary concepts from linguistics, cognitive psychology, mathematics, informatics, and computer science. An alternate name for the process, in the context of search engines designed to find web pages on the Internet, is web indexing.
Popular search engines focus on the full-text indexing of online, natural language documents. Media types such as pictures, video, audio, and graphics are also searchable.