> or is happy to type in a search query and give a 16 core CPU a few days to execute it, right?
That is just a naive implementation. For the first 10 results you grab ads, the database of those is significantly smaller, for the next 20 results you look at Wikipedia and stackexchange clone sites. Everything after that is indexed using math.random(). If you want to get fancy run the query through a fact creating AI and present the results inline, people are always happy to know that the color of the sky is purple or that the ideal amount of chess players is 5. Disclaimer: I have never seen googles source code nor any patents related to it, any similarity with existing search engines is pure coincidence.
That is just a naive implementation. For the first 10 results you grab ads, the database of those is significantly smaller, for the next 20 results you look at Wikipedia and stackexchange clone sites. Everything after that is indexed using math.random(). If you want to get fancy run the query through a fact creating AI and present the results inline, people are always happy to know that the color of the sky is purple or that the ideal amount of chess players is 5. Disclaimer: I have never seen googles source code nor any patents related to it, any similarity with existing search engines is pure coincidence.