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How the Internet Finds Webpages
Search engines find webpages by crawling links, indexing content, and ranking results based on relevance and authority.
Before you enter
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Start when you are ready to enter this Stage's 4 scenes and explore, respond, and learn as you go.
4
Scenes
8 min
Estimated
How do search engines discover and retrieve webpages?
Not covered here
- Details of ranking algorithms like PageRank specifics
- SEO tactics
- URL structure
What happens inside
- 01The Mystery of Instant Search ResultsslideSlot 1Hook
Pose the question: When you search for something, how does Google know about billions of pages in milliseconds?
- Search engines return results almost instantly
- But there are billions of websites
- How do they even know a page exists?
- 02The Discovery ProblemslideSlot 2Tension
Highlight the scale: new pages appear every second. Without a manual submission, how does a search engine find them?
- New pages are created constantly
- No one submits every page manually
- Search engines must discover pages automatically
- 03Simulate a Web CrawlerinteractiveSlot 3Reveal
Run a simple simulation where a crawler starts from a known page and follows links to discover new pages, building an index.
- Crawlers start from known pages
- They follow hyperlinks to new pages
- The collected pages are stored in an index
- 04The Three-Step ProcessslideSlot 4Takeaway
Summarize how the internet finds webpages: Crawling, Indexing, Ranking.
- Crawling: Automated bots follow links across the web
- Indexing: Pages are stored and organized in a database
- Ranking: Algorithms determine relevance and order results
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