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:Fsking video format.

[Anonymous Coward]

Please explain how these programs provide patent-free, Open Source, non-crappy video codecs.

Re:I use Google at work

[TheLink]

a) Don't use Google.
b) Use a different anonymizing proxy for _each_ single search, preferably using SSL.
c) Assume your searches AND non-encrypted web requests aren't anonymous and secure.

If I were running the NSA or some other spook agency, I'd tap the pipes leading to Google (and a few other sites too).

Same if I were a dubious org/agency.

Lots of finance institutions/orgs/ppl get the bulk of their info from just a few sources e.g. Bloomberg. So if Bloomberg gets/sends the bulk of their info down just a few pipes... ;)

Dirt? That more like modelling clay

[TheLink]

Given the bias of the site if that's all the dirt they can dig up, Google must be a pretty good company, and/or the people at that site are just crap at digging up dirt.

Think about it, if someone really hated any of the Fortune 500 companies and bothered to dig up some dirt, there'd be tons more dirt.

I suppose Google is a young company. Give it a few more years and more parasites would have found their way into Google. Then you'd have a lot more dirt.

Re:GFS

[AKAImBatman]

I mean, they are both distributed filesystems with the same name. What are the odds? ;)

Considering that it's in vogue to name file systems with one letter in front of "FS"? About 1 in 26. The odds are even better if you discount commonly used file systems such as XFS, UFS, FFS, NFS, and JFS.

Re:G4/TechTV

[Schwarzchild]

Discovery channel is a shadow of its former self. They used to actually show science programs. Now all of their programming is merely Hotrod this or that.