How does an internet search work? Do they get slower for each new internet page created or are there mecanisms to avoid that?

Question

How does an internet search work? Do they get slower for each new internet page created or are there mecanisms to avoid that?

In:

Answer 1

Others have mentioned how, in general, a search engine crawls the internet and indexes the pages in advance, but there’s probably value in talking specifically about PageRank, which is how Google became the winner of the early search engine competition.

Put simply, since you’re five, the indexer may tell you what subjects a web site covers, but it doesn’t really tell you which websites are *the best* or *the most important* for your search terms. PageRank uses links from other websites as a way to determine how important a site is. Lots of other people link to the Wikipedia entry for a subject, so therefore, that Wikipedia entry must be one of the most important websites about that subject and it should come up really early in the search results.

Now, of course, Google does more than that to rank search results these days, but PageRank was pretty innovative, and was one of the big things that put Google out in front.