Udemy, Coursera, 2U/edX Face Lawsuits Over Meta Pixel Use

Class Central is learner-supported. When you buy through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

Brilliant

Search Engines

via Brilliant

Go to class Write review

Overview

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!

Syllabus

  • Big Search: Search engines are powerful, but the ideas behind them don't need to be mysterious.
    • Searching the Whole World: The first step to understanding search engines is understanding the scale of the problem.
    • Four Thousand Years of Search Engines: The ideas that drive massive internet search engines are actually pretty ancient.
    • Crawling the Web: Before you search the web, a search engine has to figure out what's out there.
  • Effective Search: Puzzle your way towards understanding the hidden power of search engines.
    • Searching with Sherlock Holmes: In this chapter, you'll be using a simple search engine that searches Sherlock Holmes stories.
    • Word Search: A search engines limited to single-word searches requires you to use your powers of deduction.
    • Many Words at Once: Using the AND operator in searchers allows for much more powerful queries.
    • Exact Phrases: Exact phrase search is a powerful tool on both Google and our Sherlock searcher.
    • Searching with Logic: Learn to wield all of the power of logic to get better results out of search!
    • Search Challenges: Practice your skills on these Sherlock challenges!
  • Implementing Search: To understand how big search engines work, there's nothing better than building your own!
    • Introducing Indexes: The "one weird trick" of computer science that makes search engines work.
    • Building an Index: Start with the smallest of search engines in order to understand the biggest ones.
    • An Algorithm for Indexing: The same process can build a search engine with sticky notes or with powerful computers!
    • Word Search with an Index: A search index makes it extremely easy to handle single-word search queries. Is it worth the effort?
    • Queries with AND and OR Operators: Combining multiple words in a single query requires some logic and some cleverness.
    • Queries with NOT Operators: Supporting NOT queries can be tricky, but the NOT and AND operators go great together!
    • Limitations of the Index: Can search strategy used so far cope with quoted multi-word queries?
    • Lossless Indexing: A powerful new extension of an old idea for supporting quoted multi-word queries.
    • Storing the Index: How big is the index, anyway?
    • Phrases and Wildcards: How can you tell whether words in a search occur together or apart?
    • Improving Search: So you've built a search engine. Now what?

Reviews

Start your review of Search Engines

Go to class

Never Stop Learning.

Get personalized course recommendations, track subjects and courses with reminders, and more.

Sign up for free
Someone learning on their laptop while sitting on the floor.