How does Google do it?

Doc Tagle writes "With Google reportedly on the verge of going public, more and more people want to know what makes Google tick. The Observer, serves up the answers to our questions."

Comments

How does Google do it?

[Talez]

PigeonRank! Duhhhhhh

Re:Google Problems

[Motherfucking Shit]

If Google had chosen to go with a superior platform, they probably would have been able to go pubic already.

Well, I suppose "Micro soft" isn't the superior platform for anyone's pubic ventures...

the reason they keep their mouth shut

[gevmage]

It's quite possible the reason that they keep their mouth shut about their capabilities is to avoid the NSA (or someone like them) to come calling. After all, they basically have a distributed database of the entire net, which they index efficiently on a continuous basis. Who wants to bet that their system is better at gathering intelligence than any government agency in the world?

On the other hand, here's the conspiracy theory version: what if Google IS the NSA? The IPO is a smokescreen to try to avert attention. The reason they can't show their true capability is that when the company goes public, only 20% of their hardware will actually go into the public company "Google", the rest of the hardware will still be hidden and a part of the NSA's system. :-)

[For the humor impaired, I'm just joking, but it does make you wonder...]

Re:Additional questions

[nacturation]

Google search for the letter "a" resulted in 3,530,000,000 hits [search took 0.12 seconds].

Neat. I wonder what doing a Google search would return for other letters:

"c" -- 299,792,458 hits
"e" -- 2.71828183 hits
"h" -- 6.626068 × 10^-34 hits
"i" -- sqrt(-1) hits
"k" -- 1.3806503 × 10^-23 hits

Looks like Google is definitely busted. They should fix these bugs.

Re:Google is faltering

[Decameron81]

I bet you wouldn't know you need more than an unsigned 32 bit integer before you hit it.

On a side note I would really like to know which one is page number 1.

Diego Rey

Re:Google is faltering

[zcat_NZ]

"64 billion should be enough for anybody" .. ?

Re:How does Google do it?

[theRG]

My favorite Google features:

http://labs.google.com/
http://www.google.com/i ntl/xx-klingon/
http://www.google.com/intl/xx-elm er/

How do they do it? Two words

[JoeBaldwin]

Underpants gnomes.

Leprechauns!

[penginkun]

I mean, how else could they do it?

just read almost everything on google-watch.org

[tsadi]

i say google-watch.org is as credible a site as this one: www.realultimatepower.net - go ahead, click the link - its a hilarious site

Re:Interesting

[Psychic Burrito]

Google is cracking down on dupes? Oh no, Slashdot is doomed! :-)

Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public?

[AhBeeDoi]

With google: before I give them my money, I would like to know how many servers they have, how close to capacity they are, what softwares they use (compatibility issues).

Not to mention source code for custom applications, maintenance schedules, software upgrade schedules, standard permissions settings, root passwords, type and model of CPU cooling fans used, average uptimes and other relevant information which all prudent investors need.

Doing half as well as Google

[alien_tracking_devic]

from the artice:

"Google manages to achieve this with sophisticated techniques for rippling changes through the cluster, yet achieves 100 per cent uptime. This is serious stuff, and there are a lot of IT managers out there who would give their eye-teeth to be able to do it half as well."

Sigh...as an IT manager I can only dream of 50% uptime. Damn you, Google!

annoying ads

[602]

It's a good article, but the page as a whole is annoying, due to several animated ads. I won't put up with that shit. I copied the text to my word processor for reading.