Behind the Scenes At Google

An anonymous reader writes "University of Wahington TV Presents "behind the Scenes With Google." From the site: 'Search is one of the most important applications used on the internet and poses some of the most interesting challenges in computer science. Providing high-quality search requires understanding across a wide range of computer science disciplines. In this program, Jeff Dean of Google describes some of these challenges, discusses applications Google has developed, and highlights systems they've built, including GFS, a large-scale distributed file system, and MapReduce, a library for automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computation. He also shares some interesting observations derived from Google's web data.' "

Comments

Re:I use Google at work

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I have some pretty important lists which I need to keep tight control over. The information really ought not be distributed outside my office. However, because of the nature of my business, I must do frequent searches using various search engines to fill in my lists.

If you want to keep something private, don't put it on the publicly accessible internet. Including searches. Duh.

How am I assured that my searches remain anonymous and secure with Google?

You aren't. Did you sign a contract to that effect? No.

And frankly, if you can find things with google, it isn't too secret.

Re:GFS

[AKAImBatman]

Ok, I looked it up. You're confusing Sistina's (now Red Hat) Global File System with the Google File System. The two ARE NOT THE SAME.

Here's Red Hat:

http://www.redhat.com/software/rha/gfs/

Here's Google:

http://www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-g hemawat.pdf (PDF)
http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:m0TMQYgIlIoJ: www.cs.rochester.edu/sosp2003/papers/p125-ghemawat .pdf+Google+File+System&hl=en&client=safari (HTML)

Equal Time

[DanielMarkham]

Hey -- I love Google. Use it every day, and I think they're doing some really neat stuff. But this was an hour-long commercial for Google - -to me it looked designed to recruit from college campuses. While I think it's great that Google does this (it sure sounds like a great way to get cheap qualified labor) is it really new or interesting? Or even geeky? So we have redundant clustering, LISP-like patterns, and issues of dealing with BIG stuff. Hasn't the industry already done all of this, like dozens of times? You can't tell me VISA international doesn't handle this size data, or that General Motors doesn't have some of the same scaling issues. I read somewhere that Wal-Mart has one of the biggest computer systems in the world. To me the signal-to-noise ratio was out of whack to make it worth an hour of my time. Just my opinion folks.