Bits to Bitcoin: How Our Digital Stuff Works by Mark Stuart Day

Author:Mark Stuart Day
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: computer systems; IT infrastructure; introduction; operating systems; distributed systems; computer networks; data networks; networking; internet; virtualization; interrupts; locks; blockchain; coordination; mutable storage; mutability; equality; lost update; concurrency; multitasking; browsing; fault-tolerance; routing; Uniform Resource Locator; URL; Domain Name System; DNS; hierarchical naming; public-key cryptography; key distribution
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2018-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Searching Searches

The Google search page is actually a little more sophisticated than what we’ve described so far. Even when we narrow our attention to just the text box, there is also a “prompting” or “completion” feature that we haven’t yet described.

The search box has another action attached, in addition to the “search” action that we have described. This additional action takes place after every single character typed by the user. Originally, this kind of action was intended for validation of what the user types. On each keystroke, the triggered action can check whether the input character is acceptable, and reject or correct it if it is not.

The Google search page ingeniously repurposes that input validation to produce quite a different effect. The per-character action takes the partial search string (including the newly typed character) and hands it to the server for a search. But the browser is asking for a different kind of search from the ones we previously described. Instead of searching the web for corresponding results, there is a search of popular Google searches. Why is that helpful? Many other people may have previously searched for something similar to what you’ve typed so far. The set of all information on the web is inconceivably huge, but there is only a much smaller set of currently popular phrases resembling what you’ve typed so far. Accordingly, it’s possible to do a useful search of popular relevant phrases much more rapidly than is possible for searching the whole web.

The top few results of the search are supplied as possible choices that are displayed adjacent to the search box. Each such choice has an associated action to perform the corresponding search. Effectively, each character typed is triggering a program. That program contacts a Google server to run another program. That server program in turn sends back snippets of text each associated with its own little program. The user experiences all this as the service making helpful suggestions. Meanwhile, the underlying mechanism is doing a surprising amount of surprisingly complicated work in response to every single keystroke. Once again we see the possibilities that arise from the sheer number of steps that modern computers can take during an interval that seems quite short in human terms.

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