Web Search

Today we’re going to talk about search engines, which are just AI systems that try to help us find what we’re looking for. Search engines can be the sort that serve up a list of results, like during a Google or Bing search, using web crawlers, an inverted index, and measuring stuff like click through and bounce back to figure out what you want to see. They can also be the kind that give you answers, like when you ask Siri or Alexa a question, relying on knowledge bases. Admittedly, these systems aren’t perfect so next week we’ll talk about bias in AI systems like this.