CS100 Lecture Notes - Polysemy, Apple Inc., Inverted Index
3 Apr 2013
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Document Summary
Today there are more than one trillion webpages[1], containing an incredible amount of information on every topic imaginable. Furthermore, the number of webpages is growing by billions of pages each day. Like the libraries of old, it is impossible to find what you are looking for by browsing around from page to page. Even if a computer could do the browsing for you and could load 1000 pages per second, it would take over. 31 years to check every page one after the other. As you have experienced, however, google and other search engines can return answers to your requests almost instantaneously. Before answering that question, let"s look a bit closer at the types of searches, or queries, that google supports. (similar facilities are provided by many other engines, but we"ll look at google to make our discussion more concrete. ) You might try the table of contents to find relevant sections and then browse from there.
