What time is it for your friend in Tokyo? What’s the lifespan of a hummingbird? What is happening in a lunar eclipse? All great questions that you can answer with the help of a search engine like Google.
But how does Google work? How does a search engine answer your questions?
In 94 seconds of Intro to Computer Science, Professor Dave Evans explains how a search engine works using a concept map of a search engine’s three main components.
- Web crawler: follows links around the web to gather data on what pages are out there;
- Index: stores this data to enable quick responses to search queries;
Want to learn more? Check out Intro to Computer Science, a self-paced Python programming course where you’ll build your own search engine as you learn fundamental programming concepts.
This course is a great introduction to computer science, because you’ll learn concepts by breaking complex systems into smaller pieces that you’ll tackle by writing code.
Check out some of the amazing projects students have created after completing this course!