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Google's Technology Explored
RobotWisdom writes "Internetnews offers a moderately detailed peek at Google's technology. For example, they use stripped-down Red Hat on a massively redundant network, and they're starting to have success with automatic clustering of concepts, so that pages can match even if none of the words in your query actually appear on the page." Additional analysis on InformationWeek and C|Net. From the article: "As a search query comes into the system, it hits a Web server, then is split into chunks of service. One set of index servers contains the index; one set of machines contains one full index. To actually answer a query, Google has to use one complete set of servers. Since that set is replicated as a fail-safe, it also increases throughput, because if one set is busy, a new query can be routed to the next set, which drives down search time per box."
It really is amazing to think of the amount of information and data that we can access so quickly these days. When I stop and think about what my little search query goes through to bring me an almost instant response, it almost seems impossible. Of course the search engine side of this is only one example, but it's a nifty insight into how powerfull our infrastructure is these days. Bravo, mankind.
Google's redundancy theory works on a meta level, as well, according to Hoelzle. One literal meltdown -- a fire at a datacenter in an undisclosed location -- brought out six fire trucks but didn't crash the system.
/.ing could do this. On the other hand, they have a level of redundancy and up time many businesses would kill for.
Gee.. I wish our
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
It's also amazing how much of the general knowledge of the world we *can't* access, because it's unconnected or unpublished.
Just think about how vast and extensive Google's search is, and then think about how little of the World's knowledge and creative achievement it actually can access.
The quantity and breadth of human knowledge is breathtaking, no?
It's been tried. From TFA:
One literal meltdown -- a fire at a datacenter in an undisclosed location -- brought out six fire trucks but didn't crash the system.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
From the summary:
they're starting to have success with automatic clustering of concepts, so that pages can match even if none of the words in your query actually appear on the page.
From the help guide:
By default, Google only returns pages that include all of your search terms.
Which of these is correct? If it's the summary, is there any way to turn this behaviour off? I find it immensely annoying.
Guy asked me for a quarter for a cup of coffee. So I bit him.
Here it is, from one of the Google guys:
Google: A Behind-the-Scenes Look.
Simpy
Do they share these patches with everyone else?
" pages can match even if none of the words in your query actually appear on the page"
The main flaw I've found in Google's results has been when it returns pages without one of my query words, which doesn't respond to the sense of my query. Sometimes it's changed page content at the same URL, so I go back and get the "cached" page, if it exists. The cached pages reveal in their headings whether the page matched only because the query word was found only in another page linking to the returned page. I'd like their immediate results to show that distinction, and to have links in the results to click around those pages related by my complete query. The current click/back/"cache" combinations are frustratingly disconnected, conflicting with Google's otherwise smooth immediacy.
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The company also is applying machine learning to its system to give better results. Theoretically, he said, if someone searches for "Bay Area cooking class," the system should know that "Berkeley courses: vegetarian cuisine" is a good match even though it contains none of the query words.
FYI.
Not A Sig
Anyhow, the article mentioned that in these early datacentres they experienced something like a 25% hardware failure rate, but that it didn't matter because the software worked around it and the hardware was cheap.
Here's a link to the page where I read all this neat stuff. It's probably mostly about the same stuff as the article we've all just slashdotted, but I won't be albe to tell for a while....
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Why not enhance the robots.txt format to include a max crawl rate variable? Let the webmaster specify how often a robot is allowed to crawl a page.
http://brandonbloom.name
I've done a more studying in that area than most. There has been a lot of over-reacting to paradoxes such as this. Godel's Incompleteness theorem is only narrowly interesting: as soon as you start talking about physical things, these paradoxes are much less imporant.
A set which contains all sets which do not contain themselves may be a conundrum, but a catalog that lists all catalogs that do not list themselves is merely impossible (trivially impossible, in fact). There are plenty of things that can be described in English that aren't possible things, and most of them aren't very interesting.
The important consequence of Godel's Theorem to physical things was that mathematics is not a completely accurate model of physical objects. One physical object plus one physical object equals two physical objects, but not every equation describes the physically possible (OK, it was already known that this was the case, but Godel showed it was the case more often than expected).
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