It's not Magic

    According to HubSpot, Google processes nearly 5.6 billion searches a day. To help break that down, that's over 63,000 searches every second. (Prater, 2022) If you're like me, you probably never put much thought into the complexity behind each search result appearing. So, before we dive into the complexity of searching the internet, let's just say, it is not magic. 

    There are about seven steps that happen each time you search something on the internet. We will use searching Amazon as an example to explain the seven steps. The first step is typing the URL, in this case it would be "Amazon.com." This indicates you want to pull up the Amazon homepage, however within that, each of the 1000s of pages within amazon have their own unique URL. The second step is where the magic begins if you are not aware of the process. The URL is converted to an IP address which transfers information from one computer to another. Third, the information request is sent to the IP address, where the information is then received by Amazon's server. Along with the information request, the browser sends data from an Amazon cookie stored in the computer. That all happens in step four. Now moving on to step five, if the website you are looking up is simple, the server would respond to the homepage by sending a HTML code back to the computer. To explain a little more, a HTML is a client-side coding language that displays static webpages. As we all know, Amazon is not a simple website so we must go to step six. In step six, instead of sending back a static homepage, the server retrieves information from the user's past behavior on the site of the database. Amazon uses a dynamic, server-side programming language to create a homepage tailored to the user's preferences. Then the tailor-made homepage is translated into HTML and sent back to the user's computer. In the final step, the user's browser processes the HTML code and displays the homepage on the user's computer. 

    If that doesn't sound complicated enough, every time the user searches something within the website, the whole process starts over. Searching within the homepage makes a request to Amazon's server and a response from the server is sent back to the user's computer. Due to Amazon's size, it owns thousands of its own servers to respond to all the interest user's requests. So next time you search something up on the internet, you will understand the process that often seems like magic.