What Are Search Engines & How Do They Work?
by Jeremy Cohen July 20, 2004 When I was in college in the late 1980s there was no such thing as a search engine. There was no World Wide Web, at least not the web that you and I know today. The Internet at that time was limited to use by our government (who feared nuclear catastrophe and desperately sought a method to preserve itself in the tragic event of a first strike by the Soviet Union) and by academic geeks who wanted a better way to store, share and access data. Those days, and the Soviet Union, are gone forever. Since that time the World Wide Web has grown into a behemoth collection of billions of web pages featuring information about almost any subject. Martial arts, fine art, music, chemistry, pickles, planes, plastics, you name it, its out there. The amount of data is staggering. And to me, whats even more staggering is how people like us are able to plop in front of our computers, type a quick description of what we seek into something called a search engine and poof!, we
