✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

Searching the Whole World | Brilliant

brilliant.org · 327 words · saved by 1 readers

When we type words into a search bar, computers in many different places spring to work in the blink of an eye. Search engines give us a level of access to information that would have been breathtaking to humans a generation ago. We take web search for granted, but it's an amazing feat of engineering and computer science. In this course, you'll peek behind the curtain to learn how clever algorithms and data structures make this technology possible. It’s hard to develop intuition about how search works. Computers are very fast, but the amount of information collected on the internet is very big. Should looking for all occurrences of the word “puzzle” in ten years of your email history be fast because computers are fast, or is it slow because ten years of email history is an awful lot of information to sort through? To find all the instances of a word in a document, the simplest strategy is to read the document from beginning to end. This would be tedious and slow for a human. But when b

Practice Search Engines | Brilliant Courses Sign in Sign up Search Engines Dig into the core ideas behind search engine technology, from how they're built to ways they can run faster. 20 Lessons 80 Exercises Level 1 Big Search Searching the Whole World Four Thousand Years of Search Engines Crawling the Web Level 2 Effective Search Searching with Sherlock Holmes Word Search Many Words at Once Exact Phrases Searching with Logic Search Challenges Level 3 Implementing Search Introducing Indexes Building an Index An Algorithm for Indexing Word Search with an Index Queries with AND and OR Operators

Explore this link on the map →

related reading