The inner workings of search engines are pretty complex systems and can be very intimidating. But what if we were to look at search engines differently? What if we saw them instead as a fruit stand?

There may have been a time when this fruit stand could've been run by one person, but now the demand at the stand is far too high for one person and the job is divided up into three different tasks:

Crawler: the task of the Crawler is straightforward: search all of the fields and forests that you can find for fruit. It doesn't matter what kind it is, what it tastes like, or whether you think that anyone will want to eat it. You find it, you take it. The performance of a Crawler could be measured by how much fruit it could gather over time -- the faster the better. Big fruit stands may have multiple crawlers that can easily do their jobs concurrently.

Indexer: the Indexer is the heart of the stand's business. After the Crawler(s) delivers its harvest, the Indexer goes to work organizing the fruit in a way that will be convenient for any Searchers that happen to come by. Depending on the kind of Searchers that the stand typically sees, the Indexer may organize the fruit by type, age, color, size, or otherwise. The cart itself can then be called the index, which is the place where the Indexer places all of the organized fruit. Notice that the word "index" has been used before in this course (in the context of lists as well as loops)...this is the same word but with a different meaning! The Indexer puts the fruit on the stand in an order that it can remember so that it can quickly find a particular type of fruit when a Searcher asks for it.

Searcher: the Searcher is the customer who is looking for the perfect fruit. Different Searchers are usually looking for different fruit, and can often be very picky with their requirements for each individual piece. They search through the fruit stand and find the fruit that best fits what they're looking for, and want to get in, find their fruit, and get out as quickly as possible.