190 Inverting the Paradox of Excellence
1996, Brin and Page released their search engine on the Stanford website. They christened their new
search engine Google after googol, the term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros.
A search engine connects the keywords that users enter (queries) to a database it has created
of web pages (an index). It then produces a list of links to pages (and summaries of content) that
it believes are most relevant to a query. Search engines consist of four main components: a web
crawler, an index, a runtime index, and a query processor (the interface that connects users to the
index). The web crawler is a piece of software that goes from link to link on the web, collecting the
pages it nds and sending them back ...