Design Google Search
A web search engine is a system that crawls the internet, indexes web pages, and returns relevant results in response to user queries. It enables users to find information across billions of web pages in milliseconds.
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The core challenge is scale. The web contains hundreds of billions of pages, users expect results in under 500 milliseconds, and the content is constantly changing. A search engine must continuously discover new pages, understand their content, determine their importance, and serve relevant results to millions of concurrent users.
Popular Examples: Google Search, Bing, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, Yandex
In this chapter, we will explore the high-level design of a web search engine like Google Search.
This problem is one of the most comprehensive system design questions because it touches on web crawling, distributed storage, information retrieval, machine learning for ranking, and low-latency serving at massive scale.
Let's start by clarifying the requirements: