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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."
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They will not have to disclose the number of machines, the OS, the anything related to the machines. Wall Street isn't buying their technology, they are buying their cash flow.
If you do not believe me, buy a share of GE. Pick up the phone, call Investor Relations and ask them how many Unix computers they have and what OS and patch level they run.
"Google has been at 4.285 billion pages for more than three months straight. The count hasn't increased in a long time... The index is maxed."
Hmm... are they using a 32-bit integer to keep the page count?
2^32 = 4.294 billion, pretty close to 4.285 billion pages.
Newbies...
And the fact that there are so many articles, from people that just can't understand why google is successful, just goes to show you how screwed we all are...
Practically everyone in business is determined to be as evil as possible torwards their customers (and employees) and assume that anybody doing anything else must be doing something wrong, no matter what all other indicators may say.
For a great example, read The Wal-Mart Myth.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"To be or not to be"
and I honestly can't see what you are going on about: of the first ten results, eight highlighted the phrase in the page synopsis, one used the phrase as a domain name, and one included the parital phrase "...Or Not To Be."
Note the elipsis on that last one: it alludes to a larger portion of text preceding the printed portion. And the domain-name was found even though the spaces were omitted.
Those aren't irregular results: those are highly intelligent results.
Just because they aren't deterministic enough for you to plug them into a piece of code of your own construction (without compensating Google) doesn't mean that they don't fulfill the purpose of the web search.
What is the difference between a small revolutionary change and a large evolutionary change?
The problem is, I've never paid these people a single penny for ANY of this. How the hell are they going to make money?
Um, you do realize that Google already makes a profit, don't you? I daresay the IPO will puff the value of the company up beyond the rational amount, but that's not 'Enron' -- if you are going to use buzzwords, use the right ones. Enron was a case of internal actors in the company using financial games to siphon off profits and inflate the value of the company on the books. You accusing Google of financial fraud? If you are going to use a buzzword, use 'Yahoo' or something -- a solid company that got its stock price puffed up excessively due to investor mania.
How the hell did this get moderated up, except as 'Funny'?