How A Search Engine Works

Indexing
- Locates files in folders or by following links
- Opens each file and gets all the words
- Stores the words and related info in the index file
Searching
- Receives a query -- a set of search terms and commands
- Looks in the index file for matches to the search terms
- Gathers the matching page information
- Sorts the results by relevance (how well they match the query)
- Formats the result page in HTML
- Returns it to the searcher's web browser

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Indexing