How Software Works

7Search

This chapter is about a topic that, perhaps more than any other subject covered in this book, we all take for granted: finding the data we want, known as a search. Searching happens so often, and so quickly, that it’s easy to miss the magic. When a word processor underlines a misspelled word that you just typed, a fast search has taken place behind the scenes. When you enter part of a filename and get a list of matching files on your laptop’s hard drive, that’s another near-instant search. And then there’s the ultimate search achievement: the Web. The Web is so unfathomably large that we can only guess its true size, and yet, web search ...