Monday, November 22, 2004

Search Engine are the most thrilling (apparently)

Yesterday, our computer teacher, had to lose her nerve over the constant chattering going on among the backbenchers of our class. Add to that the level of technical illeteracy my fellow classmates have. And all that led to one of the most exciting and bizzare description of "Search Engine" technology. Here it is, the whole transcript. no editing.

"Yes, students, be quiet. Now we move on to Search Engines. These are special websites or softwares created to help you search the internet.
As you know, the internet is also called world wide web. And on that web, there are special spiders. There are many types of spiders out there. For example robots, etc.
A spider's job is to report back the links.
Now when you search, for example, go to google, and type Visual Basic [she pronounces it Vijual. sic!], it would return you some links. What happens is that at the instant you press the 'search' button, all these spiders are let out on the internet. They travel really fast. They perform a scan of the www and return the links. The page which has most of the matching words will be displayed at the top of the list and so on."

She has to be on drugs to throw up that definition. Does she even know how the technology works? Searching the net would take thousands of years on a single PC. Hell, even all the efforts of Search Engines, combined has been able to index 30 or 40% of the Internet. God save those aspiring Computer Engineers!

I'm no UltraGeek so far, but even my short virtual span has not gone without understanding basic underlying technologies.

If anybody wants to know more about Search Engines, go to the conventional place for wisdom here

No comments: