e h t r o f g n Looki ! E G A P T LOS Are you looking for information about the dinosaurs? You can find almost everything on the internet! You only need to access the Web with your computer, smartphone or tablet to visit billions of different websites. Each one of these websites contains many different web pages, which contain texts, images, videos, videogames... But how can we find what we need inside this huge sea of web pages? We need search engines!
Search engines The most famous one is Google, have you heard of it? But it is not the only one: we also have Bing, Yahoo! and many others! When you are looking for information about something, like “dinosaurs”, you only need to write “dinosaurs” on the search bar, press “Enter” and you get a list of pages related to that word.
How do we sort out these pages? With mathematics! Search engines can identify the most and the less important results. The results you get when you write “dinosaurs” are always listed in this order. But what does it mean? In order to decide if a page is important or not, we need a lot of... mathematics! Search engines work thanks to two different ”branches” of mathematics: graph theory, which studies the structure of the web, and numerical analysis, which studies how to “work out” the right calculations.
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