Part I: Search Fundamentals | Scaling Search and Retrieval for Contextual AI

📄️ Chapter 1: What Is a Search Engine, Really?

Understand the foundational responsibilities and evolving role of search engines in modern systems and AI applications.

Understand the internal data structures that make search engines fast, scalable, and efficient.

Learn how data flows into a search engine and is prepared for efficient retrieval.

Understand how search engines store and manage data on disk to balance speed, durability, and scale, and how this differs from analytics systems.

Learn how queries are planned, executed, and scored for optimal performance.

Understand how search engines handle concurrent writes, memory management, and durability.