SEARCH INDEXING

Search engines have a profound effect on our lives. The vast amount of
information available an the speed and quality of the results have come to seem
so normal that we actually get frustrated if a question can't be answered within
a few seconds.

Major search engine companies runs an international network of enormous

data centers, containing thousands of server computers and advanced
networking equipment. But all that hardware would be useless without the
clever algorithms needed to organize and retrieve the information we request.

Two of the main tasks for a search engine are matching and ranking. In
practice, search engines combine matching and ranking into a gle for
efficiency. But the two phases are conceptually separate, so we'll assume that
matching is completed before ranking begins. There can be thousands or
millions of matches after the first (matching phase), and these must be sorted
by relevance in the second (ranking stage).

A good search engine, therefore, will not only pick out the best few hits, but
display the in the most useful order. The task of picking the best few hits in the
right order is called "ranking" This is the crucial second phase that follows the
initial matching phase. In the cut-throat world of the search industry, search
engines like or die by the quality of their ranking systems.

The first web-scale matching algorithm

Where does the story of search engine matching algorithms actually begin? An
obvious but wrong answer would be Google. But the idea of web search had
already been around for several years.

Among the earliest commercial offerings were Infoseek and Lycos (both
launched in 1994), and AltaVista, which launched its search engine in 1995. For
a few years in the mid-1990s, AltaVista was the king of the search engines. For
the first time, a search engine had fully indexed all of the text on every page of
the web - and even better results were returned in the blink of an eye.

The journey toward understanding this sensational technological

breakthrough begins with a (literally) age-old concept: indexing.

Plain old indexing

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