There are millions and millions of sites on the
internet. How does a search engine know which
ones are relevant to your search? This is a question
that great minds have been working on for
decades. To understand how Google changed the
game, you need to know how search engines
worked in 1998. Back then most websites looked
at the words in your query. They counted how
many times those words appeared on each page.
Then they might return pages where the words in
your query appeared the most. This system did not
work well and people often had to click through
pages and pages of results to find what they
wanted.