Inside the Belly of a Search Engine

Course
  • Fundamentals

Inside the Belly of a Search Engine

They have made encyclopedias obsolete: Web search engines like Google or Bing provide us with the information we are looking for at lightning speed. Surveys have shown that every Internet user searches via Google 3 to 4 times a day on average. In total, estimates assume more than 2 trillion search queries* per year, and the trend is rising.

If you want to understand how these search engines work, this course is for you.

Offered by Dr. Anne Kayem | Last updated on Jul 15, 2026 | 3483 enrollments

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  • Beginner
  • EN
  • Certificate
Course information

Are you curious about how web search engines provide you with information daily? Are you surprised at the speed at which web search engines are able to respond to your complex and sometimes incomplete queries? Are you wondering how to build your website so that it can be easily found by others through the search engine (search engine optimization)?

This two-week workshop aims to provide an introduction to how search engines operate in terms of how web pages are discovered, indexed, and retrieved to display information in a structured form to respond to queries (words used to search for information). We discuss how documents are clustered based on similarity and ranked based on query relevance to generate responses to user queries. As a concluding highlight, we consider various forms of visualizing search engine results and why search engines like Google remain popular.

*source: Wikipedia

Attention: This course is currently in self-study mode, in which you do not have access to graded assignments/exams. Therefore, we can only issue you a certificate of participation.

Learning goals
  • understand how search engines structure queries
  • understand how search engines discover and index web pages
  • To make the best use of search engines
  • Structure web pages so that they can be found easily
Requirements for Proofs of Achievement
  • Confirmation of Participation: You will automatically receive a free Confirmation of Participation once you have completed at least 50% of the content.
  • Certificate: You will receive your official openHPI Certificate by earning at least 50% of the maximum number of points from all graded assignments.

Find out more on our page for Proofs of Achievement and Guidelines.

Our teachers

Dr. Anne Kayem

Dr. Anne Kayem is a senior researcher at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute (Digital Engineering Faculty, University of Potsdam, Germany). She leads the Data Privacy team embedded within the Internet Technologies and Systems Chair. Her research interests range from designing and analysing secure and privacy preserving data sharing algorithms, to evaluating their usability. She is a senior member of the ACM and IEEE. For more details about her research, please visit: https://hpi.de/sprite/home.html