CUSTOMIZING THE WEB The Internet has put more information at our fingertips than ever before With a few clicks we can research any topic Our searches return millions of results For Internet users browsing the Web is easy In fact we usually take it for granted But for the companies that run websites sifting through all that data is a massive task DIGITAL OVERLOAD As of June 2017 Google's search engine tracked approximately 130 trillion Web pages That includes about 1 billion websites and With Google and other popular search engines information is easy to come by
We use algorithms all the time when we do math more than 152 million blogs An average of 6 000 tweets are posted on Twitter every second Every minute 300 hours of YouTube videos are uploaded Every day 4 75 billion posts are made on Facebook It's hard to picture the vast scale of such numbers All the data on the Web would fill more than 305 billion pieces of paper If you stored all the data on CDs the stack would reach the moon To process all this data people use complex formulas called algorithms ALGORITHMS AND THE WEB An algorithm is a set of step by step instructions for carrying out a task When you follow a recipe or do
your math homework you are using algorithms Surfing the Web sending e mail downloading music algorithms tell your computer how to complete all WHAT'S IN A NAME The word algorithm comes from Al Khwarizmi This Persian mathematician wrote a book about algorithms Al Khwārizmi lived around 800 to 847 CE He was a scholar at the House of Wisdom in Baghdad in what is now Iraq This center of learning attracted thinkers from around the Muslim world Al Khwarizmi is best known for his contributions to algebra and the development of the Arabic numeral system This system is still the most common way to represent numbers these tasks The algorithms that fuel the Web are automated processes They are run by complex computer programs Often we are not even aware that they exist Yet algorithms have the power to shape what we see and do online Consider the algorithms used by the popular social media site Facebook
