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Search Engines
Dig into the core ideas behind search engine technology, from how they're built to ways they can run faster.
Searching the Whole World
Four Thousand Years of Search Engines
Crawling the Web
Searching with Sherlock Holmes
Word Search
Many Words at Once
Exact Phrases
Searching with Logic
Search Challenges
Introducing Indexes
Building an Index
An Algorithm for Indexing
Word Search with an Index
Queries with AND and OR Operators
Queries with NOT Operators
Limitations of the Index
Lossless Indexing
Storing the Index
Phrases and Wildcards
Improving Search
Course description
The Web has billions of pages containing trillions of words, yet when you type a query into the search box, the program works for just a fraction of a second, and usually picks out just the information you wanted. How is this possible? In this course you will explore the core ideas behind search engine technology. Some of these ideas predate computers by thousands of years. In addition to learning how search engines are built and queried, you will also create your own simple search index, and learn techniques for making search run faster on that index. If you want to create the next great search engine, or if you just want to use Google to understand the world better, it’s fun and worthwhile to understand more about how search works!
Topics covered
- Creating a search index
- History of search
- Making search run faster
- Multi-word and quoted search
- Search engine design
- Searching with logical operators
- Set intersection and union
- Size of the internet
- Venn diagrams
- Web graph
Prerequisites and next steps
A basic understanding of what an algorithm is will help you understand this course, but you don't need to know how to code! Some understanding of logic is helpful: if you understand Venn diagrams, you'll be fine.