How Do The Internet Works? Simply Explained

let's ask a simple question how long does it take to travel to Mars where did these results come from and why was this listed before the other one okay let's dive in and see how the search engine turned your request into a result the first thing you need to know is when you do a search the search engine isn't actually going out to the World Wide Web to run your search in real time and that's because there's over a billion websites on the Internet and hundreds more being created every single minute so if the search engine had to look through every single site to find the one you wanted you just take forever so to make your search faster search engines are constantly scanning the web in advance to record the information that might help with your search later that way when you search about travel to Mars the search engine already has what it needs to give you an answer in real time here's how it works the Internet is a web of pages connected to each other by hyperlinks search engines are constantly running a program called a spider that crawls through these web pages to collect information about them each time.

It finds a hyperlink it follows it until it has visited every page it can find on the entire internet for each page of the spider visits it records any information in my need for a search by adding it to a special database called a search index now let's go back to that search from earlier and see if we can figure out how the search engine came up with the results when you ask how long does it take to travel to Mars the search engine looks each of those words in the search index to immediately get a list of all the pages on the internet containing those words but just looking for these search terms could return millions of pages so the search engine needs to be able to determine the best matches to show you first this is where it gets tricky because the search engine may need to guess what you're looking for each search engine uses its own algorithm to rank the pages based on what it thinks you want the search engines ranking algorithm might check if your search term shows up in the page title it might check if all of the words show up next to each other or any number of other calculations that helped it better determine which pages you'll want to see and what you want Google invented the most famous algorithm for choosing the most relevant results for a search by taking into account how many other web pages link to a given page the idea is that if lots of websites think that a web page is interesting and it's probably the one you're looking for this algorithm was called PageRank not because it ranks web pages but because it was named after its inventor.

Larry Page who is one of the founders of Google because the website often makes money when you visited and Mars are constantly trying to find ways to gain to search algorithm so that their pages are listed higher in the results search engines regularly update their algorithms to prevent fake or untrustworthy sites from reaching the top line ultimately it's up to you to keep an eye out for these pages that are untrustworthy by looking at the web address and making sure it's a reliable source search programs are always evolving to improve the algorithms so the return better results faster results and their competitors today's search engines even use information that you haven't explicitly provided to help you narrow down your search so

for example if you did a search for dog parks many search engines would give you results for all the dogs parks nearby even though you didn't type in your location modern search engines also understand more than just the words on a page but what they actually mean in order to find the best one that matches what you're looking for for example if you search for a fast picture it will know you're looking for an athlete but if you search for large picture it will find you options for your kitchen to understand the words better we use something called machine learning a type of artificial intelligence enables search algorithms to search not just individual letters or words in the page but understand the underlying meaning of the words the internet is growing exponentially as the teams that design search engines do our jobs right the information you want always be just a few keystrokes away you