Search Engine
Categories: Tech
See: Search Cost. See: SEO.
Ooooh...an engine. Rev rev.
It sounds so much cooler than "mathematically optimized parsing algorithm." But that's what a search engine is. It sucks in data, character by character, and then maps to whatever it thinks is the most relevant term.
The magic for how it defines relevance is driven by lots of things. For much of the modern era, it was the second derivative of the search itself, i.e. the volume and quality of sites linking back to that term as if it were expert, i.e., weighting .edu sites way more heavily than traffic aggregators on .com sites. Google. Bing. Dogpile. And a bunch of others, which specialize in everything from legal documents to the "dark web" to um, "art films"...are all over the web.
If you haven't tried using them, then please return to Earth from Mars. We miss you.
