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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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PigeonRank! Duhhhhhh
having been a consultant at their data center a year or so back I can attest that they had well over 50,000 machines. I am not sure about the 80GB drive per machine because from what I understood was they bought whatever drive at the time was the cheapest MB/$ and would replace any dead ones with the larger ones. Also, at any given time machines just die and many of them are not replaced or repaird for months. Their cluster accounts for all this...
-eric
One -- Slashdot seems to be into content-directed ads now... as google was my ad for this story.
Two -- If you want your pages indexed faster and more frequently, sign-up and place a google adsense ad on your page. Many webmasters believe that google is having to index so many adsense pages... that is difficult for google to add many more non-ad driven pages.
Just sign up for adsense and run it a couple of weeks while you build your site. After google has spidered your site well, then just drop adsense.
Good luck. I would love to hear any of your google-related tricks.
AC
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 already has spell check, and so does Gmail have a look at the screenshots on my blog. I believe they're looking at releasing it to the public in six months time, have a look at this article.
"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...
I mean....surely once they've gone public, they'll be obliged to detail and list the sort of information that the article postulates about? The shareholders would be entitled to know how many servers google has, what their specifications are, and what their current commercial strategy is.....surely?!
Why would a shareholder care about server specifications? Investing is all about money. Read any quarterly report from a public company. Income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow are the primary interests on the numbers side as well as a general roadmap of where the company's heading. Warren Buffett doesn't care if each server has two 80 GB drives, or whether they have four 250 GB drives per server. The only thing that matters is that there are competent people to handle these kinds of "dirty details" that an investor doesn't give a rats ass about.
Take a look at the kinds of information you could expect from Google's quarterly reports.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
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...]
Craig Steffen
http://www.craigsteffen.net
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
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.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That doesn't make any sense. A well-designed system is a transparent one, so Google would have no reason to let you know that they're running out of IDs.
By the way, for supplemental result... By doing a quick keyword search on Google using my domain name, I'm led to believe that pages marked "Supplemental Result" are pages that look like search results. That is, they aren't filled with any real content, other than search results from other engines. Results that could "supplement" your "result" from Google.
Another wonderful speculation about Google infrastructure which You can find it here.
Ah, youthful mod!
You've been (humorously) trolled. I suggest posting in this thread to remove your "+1 Informative", or getting a friend to mod it "Funny".
What the parent is describing is not what Google will do, but what DOS did: the above scheme is how MS-DOS managed memory, except that the "selector" and "offset" were both 16-bit numbers under DOS. (Although "segment" was the more usual term for "selector".) The segment number was shifted left four places -- or put more simply but less graphically, multiplied by 16 -- and then added to the offset number, to give the whole or "flat" address:segment is multipled by 16 (shifted left 4 bits or one hex digit of multipled by 16)This allowed DOS to use 16-bit numbers to address 2^20 = 1 MB of memory, but since DOS reserved the upper 384 KB for the (remapped) BIOS and peripheral cards, programs were able to address at most 640 KB of memory; the parent's mention of "64 billion pages" is probably an allusion (increased several orders of magnitude) to this DOS limit.
Of course, this was a kludge, pure and simple, required because DOS machines were 16-bit. Among other things, it allowed the same memory locations (all but the very top and bottom memory addresses) to be addressable by several different addresses, and discovering pointer aliasing it required calculations that, by their very nature couldn't be done wholly in the machines (16-bit) registers.
Consider: segment 4, offset 0 is 4 * 16 + 0 = 64,
and segment 3, offset 16 is 3 * 16 + 16 = 64,
and segment 2, offset 32 is 2 * 16 + 32 = 64
and segment 1, offset 48 is 1 * 16 + 48 = 64
and segment 0, offset 64 is 0 * 16 + 64 = 64:
so all five segment:offset pairs are apparently different but actually point to the same memory location.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
"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'?