does anybody know how search engines work? i.e. google, like, u search for something, and within seconds it has searched the entire internet and brought u back the most relevant sites (well, them seem relevant).

a normal linear searching algorithm would take like.. a billion years..

Search engine servers send out programs called Spiders which basically collect words and their website links that may be relevant to your search. When you do the search, the search engine gives you all the links it has stored. This isn't the exact description, but its along the right track.

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ya, i know what ye mean, but i'm wonderin how it searches so much information so quickly??

i remember someone once tellin me that one of yahoos servers had something like 16 high-speed (whatever was the top back then), plus somehting like 256GB or superfast ram..

i want one..

Google is a massive distributed database. Searching is fast because it's spread across hundreds (thousands?) of servers worldwide.

If you want to know more you'll have to do some research on databases. It's mainly a clustered index search.

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quote:

Originally posted by DigiNut Google is a massive distributed database. Searching is fast because it's spread across hundreds (thousands?) of servers worldwide. If you want to know more you'll have to do some research on databases. It's mainly a clustered index search.

More like tens of thousands. They have huge farms of rack servers running linux. The real genius is in the algorithm they use to search their internal networks and stuff. About all the delay there is in common searches is internal network transit latency.

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quote:

Originally posted by UglyDave ya, i know what ye mean, but i'm wonderin how it searches so much information so quickly?? i remember someone once tellin me that one of yahoos servers had something like 16 high-speed (whatever was the top back then), plus somehting like 256GB or superfast ram.. i want one..

Yahoo used google's search engine with a yahoo front end. It queried the google server with your search term and then added its' own shit too it. Handling such a large number of connnections however, does require quite a beefy server. Imagine how many searches yahoo/google gets per second. Probably thousands.

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quote:

Venus: And there are troops of savage giraffes whose necks are on fire, like the starry ejaculations of fireworks in the very pale sky of childhood ... Venus: Enter, enter here - men of all kinds and races, victims of reality! You who have the thirst for dreams. ... Venus: You, on life's bitter road, drenched in hard sunlight who have the thirst that once more the dark marvel of dreams...

It's all explained here: Google Technology

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basically, they have the whole internet in one building - the base HTML code, that is

and their servers are able to search through that really fast.


they probably have backups too, so that's at least 2 internets in one building

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Originally posted by whiskers basically, they have the whole internet in one building - the base HTML code, that is and their servers are able to search through that really fast. they probably have backups too, so that's at least 2 internets in one building

lol, I was just about to say "They downloaded the whole internet". But it appears you have beaten me to it.

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quote:

Originally posted by TeKnoHe@d2025 lol, I was just about to say "They downloaded the whole internet". But it appears you have beaten me to it.

hehe, i rushed to it too


my logic teacher was talking about it once and said that they rate the sites by hits on them - the sites with most hits get to be on top of the search results...


so for one of his research projects he and his group made a site that didn't get that many hits until they put words like "goat donkey sex" on there and then it just rocketed to the top... when asked why "goat donkey sex", he said "well, i said it off the top of my head and it worked"

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quote:

Originally posted by ebeneezer_goode go to www.google.com and type in Miserable Failure then click i'm feeling Lucky

and while you're at it, type "french military victories" and hit lucky also

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