System Design: The Distributed Search
Learn about how a search system works and understand our high-level plan for designing a distributed search system.
Why do we need a search system?
Nowadays, we see a search bar on almost every website. We use that search bar to pick out relevant content from the enormous amount of content available on that website. A search bar enables us to quickly find what we’re looking for. For example, there are plenty of courses present on the Educative website. If we didn’t have a search feature, users would have to scroll through many pages and read the name of each course to find the one they’re looking for.
Let’s take another example. There are billions of videos uploaded and stored on YouTube. Imagine if YouTube didn’t provide us with a search bar. How would we find a specific video among the millions of videos that have been posted on YouTube over the years? It would take months to navigate through all of those videos and find the one we need. Users find it challenging to find ...