Behind the Scenes: Search Engines

After reading Andrew Leibman’s article, How Search Engines Work, it’s interesting to see how much goes on for a search engine to work efficiently for it’s users. From the software to the manpower, there’s actually quite a lot that goes into making Search Engines more compatible with users. Seriously, who knew that Google were performing projects and experiments on us while we were using their product just so they can improve our experience? Even Google researches their consumers just so they can get an idea of what a specific user is generally looking for because of what the user has searched in the past. Just to imagine the time that goes into encoding, hashing, and using web crawlers just amazes me in some way. Yet this made me think about how much they look into my web history and privacy just so they can make it more to my liking. Would you consider this an invasion of privacy? Or just a necessity to make online experiences better?