The secret to the speed of search engines is that you are not actually searching the web. When you enter a search term into Google you are searching not over the whole internet but through Google’s index. This is continuously updated by automatic programs, called ‘spiders’ which follow links from every page across the web. They collect information and snapshots of the pages themselves and store them in the index. Because the index is so much smaller than the web and the entries are all stored together it is much quicker to look through. Also the index is sorted and organised to make searching faster.
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