Design Search And Web Crawling Systems
Company: Meta
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Technical Screen
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system-design and distributed-systems competencies including large-scale indexing and query-serving, relevance ranking and personalization, privacy-aware access control, real-time indexing freshness, crawler architecture with URL and content deduplication, and back-of-the-envelope capacity estimation for QPS, storage, and machine counts. It is commonly asked to probe trade-off reasoning for low-latency, fresh, and privacy-preserving search and crawl systems; it belongs to the System Design domain and combines high-level architectural reasoning with practical capacity planning and operational design.