Search engines are everywhere! You probably used a search engine to find this article. Google, Bing, Yahoo, how do these work? And how can we build a simple but effective search engine?

In this article, we will dive deep into understanding the science of search, and use our understanding to attempt at building a client-side search engine for websites.

This article is written with the first-principles approach. Instead of jumping straight to established methods, we will start with something familiar, looking up a topic in a textbook. Then we will work towards improving and optimizing our search methods to make our search engine lightweight, yet functional.