system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: Why can I search the whole internet in 0.58 sec but it takes over a minute to search a folder on my hard drive?
gpt
Google doesn't search the whole internet for you when you enter a query. It searches a massive high-availability database stored on Google servers. The database is created by webcrawling, an automated process that goes out and *actually* searches the web, but takes a lot longer than a regular Google search.

On the other hand, when you search folders on your computer it usually has to *actually* search the files on your computer. The process can be sped up a bit if the files are cached, but it's still not the type of high-availability super database that Google uses.