Google Moves From Search To Inventor

TubHarsh writes "The New York Times reports that Google continues to expand its scope from search engine to inventor. Google assembles the majority of the hardware it uses and deploys at such a large scale, that Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'. The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers."

Comments

That Link You Ordered, Sir

[eldavojohn]

I don't like being a karma whore but here's a working link to the NYTimes article. And, if you're like me and hate ads, try out the text only version. That's right, in order to get to read an article without obstruction, you have to pretend to be both an RSS feed AND a printing machine.

Now to comment on something I read in the article:

"At some point you have to ask yourself what is your core business," said Kevin Timmons, Yahoo's vice president for operations. "Are you going to design your own router, or are you going to build the world's most popular Web site? It is very difficult to do both."

I disagree with that. I think it should be re-stated to say "It is very difficult to accomplish more than you have the resources to sustain." It's fatal in thinking that you only do one thing for a business to be successful. A simple analogy would be the farms that I grew up on. No one specialized in one crop or animal. Why? Because sometimes the market would tank for one particular thing and it would tank hard. If you had a distributed investment in produce (like a portfolio) then you would survive most of the market problems. I think Google's strategy is much the same in that they are trying to cement themselves in other technologies--not because they're going to lose the search market--just because it's a smart thing to do.

I think that there's a lot to be said about concentrating on one thing and getting it right. If you do get it right, then it's encouraged to move on to something else. I think Google has found themselves in the top of the search engine market. They found out that their technology doesn't work so well for closed domains (military or business level searching) so I think they just need to keep looking for new ways to stay ahead of the competition. Meanwhile, they have seemingly unlimited resources. Why not try to build your own router?

I mean, fresh graduates are cheap. Some fresh graduates have a lot of ideas and are decent workers while the majority of others are lemons that don't do anything. Why not hire a bunch of them and spend a lot of money weeding them out? I think it's great that Google's taking a stab at other technologies and I honestly think they have a good strategy for doing it.

To comment further on the article, Google makes unreliable machines reliable en masse via redundancy. They are indeed very secretive about their technology but if you want to learn more about their page ranking algorithms or basic technologies, why not read their patents? They always seem to be covered on Slashdot anyway.

Re:That Link You Ordered, Sir

[Kaetemi]

"you have to pretend to be both an RSS feed AND a printing machine"

You just invented and RSS feed printer!
Don't forget to run to the patent office ;)

Re:That Link You Ordered, Sir

[70Bang]

Microsoft won't change their stance on Google.

I've said many times [that] Microsoft's strategy (so far) has been to keep Google labelled a search engine, and only a search engine, (albeit covertly) as long as possible to keep Google hemmed in and avoid letting people begin to see what's up Google's shirt sleeves. This has been a stall tactic. Microsoft has got to have a lot of gerbils running on the wheels to come up with ways to find the silver bullet to put right between Google's eyes. Do they think they'll find it? Probably. Will they? Probably not. Should they be scared? Yes.

I don't think it's worked, but it's the only tactic Microsoft knows. After all, their primary arsenal has always been Huey, Dewey and Louie (Marketing, Sales, and PR). When Microsoft runs out of arrows in its quiver, it'll become the one thing it has thought would never happen: become just another company, just as IBM became when Microsoft didn't renew their contract ('89? '90?)for a joint OS and it became Windows & OS/2. IBM just wasn't able to get the sell-through Microsoft got with Windows, and Microsoft was the new king of the mountain.

What's hurting Microsoft isn't they came late to the show (avoided during the most infamous "Summer of Bill" but they've had to grow from the desktop up to a global perspective, but that Google hasn't even worried about the desktop (so far). They got started at the global level and just focused upon information management, leaving a browser, essentially any browser, as the interface. I see it to be what happened to Encyclopædia Britannica when everything was electronic and they were left thinking about their next hardcopy print run, then trying to get an electronic format (and people buying CDs and DVDs) vs. something such as Wikipedia which started online.

I'm not saying every company or product which starts online will always be better, but the odds are against a hard world company|product being able to prevent or leapfrog a company which doesn't have to worry about a bridge from the past to the future and not lose sight of both balls in the air.

Another good example is BlockBuster and Netflix. Blockbuster's underlying algorithm (business model) was based upon late return fees. NetFlix comes along such that brick & mortar means nothing, reducing all of the financial obligations which go along with it, including a dependence upon those late fees. BlockBuster suddenly realized they were getting dusted in all but impulse rentals and had to do something. First, they tried to pull a fast one over everyones' eyes by declaring "no late fees" whilst slipping a hand into your wallet. When they got caught, they realized they'd better do something...and fast. So they picked the most successful video rental business model they could find on short notice: NetFlix. Just a price war.

Lots of other stories could be listed as well (e.g., Amazon vs. B&N, Border's, etc.)

Google chips?

[tygerstripes]

Now that does interest me. If they can show the same level of industrious innovation that they have in other fields, I'm excited about the impact this may have on the server-market, if nothing else.

I just hope that, if they are developing chips in-house (and if they are, I expect them to be cheap and powerful), they are less tight-fisted than they are with their other technical innovations. A new power-player in the CPU market would be great for us end-users

Seriously though, if they start manufacturing all their own hardware from scratch, they're probably going to be more independent than any major computer-based international in recent history. *exaggeration ends*

Re:Google chips?

[Jasin Natael]

Hmm... I'd kind of like to buy a RAID card that is accelerated for database and/or search work. I mean, issue high-level commands to the controller hardware, and let it collect the results while the main processor is doing something else. We're getting to the point where classical RDBMS systems are pretty well-understood, and the average RAID controller has a fair bit of hardware already. How far are we from having some relatively simple processor with an inflated L1 cache and high clock rate that does the heavy database work (including RAID/transaction logging) before it even reaches your machine?

It makes sense to do this, because database performance is big business -- just look at what some companies spend on licensing Oracle! As long as you're not worried about spatial queries, you could probably even get by without an FPU. There might be a lot of justification for this.

Re:Google chips?

[kv9]

The article also states that Google may be entering the chip design market with new employees who were ex-Alpha Chip engineers.

lemme guess, the chips are gonna be called... "Beta"?

Re:Google chips?

[Neoncow]

lemme guess, the chips are gonna be called... "Beta"?

The great thing about beta is we'll get the chips for free!

Re:Google chips?

[cowbutt]

I'd kind of like to buy a RAID card that is accelerated for database and/or search work. I mean, issue high-level commands to the controller hardware, and let it collect the results while the main processor is doing something else.

This was my degree supervisor's main research interest. Searching for 'Intelligent File Store' in conjunction with 'Essex' and 'Lavington' should find lots of juicy info.

Re:Google chips?

[Jasin Natael]

That's the traditional model. TFA talks about Google needing to get away from some of their search-business habits for their new ventures, like online payment processing and the like. Redundant persistence, logging, failover protection, etc. is a huge issue any time your database works with information that represents some kind of monetary value. It could be manipulating auction bids, virtual property like Second Life or WoW, or actual money, but there are grave legal dangers if there is something in dispute worth suing over, and your database isn't properly atomic & serializable.

The 'database card' concept could be good, using (e.g.) SRAM (or at least a separate DRAM bank) to hold transaction logs while they execute before writing a checkpoint to the logs on disk. If the power / host machine / etc fails, then a protective circuit with a small battery could write the working log and active queries to Flash memory to ensure they won't be lost. That's a problem that you simply can't solve as well without specialized hardware, or sacrificing a great deal of performance.

Re:Google chips?

[Moofie]

Because jokes get funnier when you explain them to us. Thanks!

Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe.

[TheRaven64]

One of the advantages of the Opteron platform, as we saw recently, is that it is easy to plug in dedicated, specialised, coprocessors. I wouldn't be at all surprised if a lot of Google's work could be done more efficiently on a specialised stream processor; even things like SSL for gmail etc. run a lot faster (and much faster-per-watt, which is what really counts in an operation that scale) on dedicated silicon than on a general purpose CPU.

Much as I'd like to see the Alpha return, backed by Google (or pretty much anyone else. The death of PALCode was a sad day for the industry), it doesn't seem likely. The Alpha approach was to build the fastest chip possible; in terms of performance-per-watt or performance-per-dollar, it didn't do so well.

Boycott Google ;-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Friends, remember that Google is the America hating empire.

This new wave of innovation probably uses Linux (created by a European communist) with a sordid history. No doubt this is part of an insiduous plot to destroy the valuable patents of The Sco Group.

Their so-called "inventions" have already led to a huge upturn in hacking, eponymously named "Google Hacking". All true patriots must support tougher sentences for such evil terrorists.

Re:Boycott Google ;-)

[gowen]

You might wish to develop a sense of humour and/or the ability to detect satire. Of course, the fact that shelleytherepublican can be mistaken for a real conservative blogger does cast an rather sad reflection on the state of political discourse in America.

Re:Boycott Google ;-)

[killjoe]

well seeing as how the republican bloggers are calling for the hunting down of the NY times reporters kids I'd say that it's pretty easy to get confuse shelley with a real republican. In many ways shelleytherepublican seems like a moderate republican when you read coulter, hannity, newsmax, free republic etc. At least I haven't herd her call for the hunting down of peoples kids.

Owning the supply chain

[192939495969798999]

I don't think we should think of this as a move that Google may 'sell' the machines they make, aside from selling Google search or app appliances one day. The vast majority of chips they would be making are probably to 'own the supply chain' for their own massive server systems. This is similar in concept to the early Ford Motor Company that owned the steel mills, etc. Google just wants the lowest net cost per computing cycle, and if Dell wants to earn a profit selling them computers in bulk, it might be cheaper for Google to bring that profit in-house.

Technology Incubator

[Ohreally_factor]

I think they're just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, much like VCs do. But their doing it all in-house, hoping to come up with the next big thing. And the thing after that.

Re:Technology Incubator

[MoonFog]

It could also be the media doing this and hoping a story sticks. After all, Google have really moved into many different areas, so perhaps a journalist is going "why not?" and prints a rumour, wouldn't surprise me at all.

Given Google's obvious love for thinking "outside the box" they have a higher chance of something sticking than with for example Yahoo.

Re:Technology Incubator

[l3v1]

I think they're just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks, much like VCs do. But their doing it all in-house, hoping to come up with the next big thing. And the thing after that.

Well, if you want to innovate, or research, you have to do that. VCs don't do that, they just hope that the pack of people they give money won't just waste that money but actually come up with an idea that sticks to that wall. In-house research is not comparable with what VCs do with startups which usually base their entire future on one idea and if that fails, they fail. In research every idea that you prove is a failure is in fact a success since it gives you valueable knowledge and experience which you can use in the next trials if you have the money for it, and well, they have the money.

BBC says: Google to remain focused on search

[joab_son_of_zeruiah]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5140066.stm go figure

This kind of thing that keeps us loving google

[chrisrx]

I think google is just an amazing company, they hire some of the worlds top developers, build their own servers and apparently their own cpus now just to make sure that everything runs smoothly. Couple that with froogle, google maps and google earth, summer of code and submission of code back to open source projects such as wine. It's a shame that there aren't more companies like google that do everything they can to put their customers first and their profits later.

Re:This kind of thing that keeps us loving google

[LWATCDR]

Umm....
Hey I like Google and I do think it is a good company but please throw in a few facts along with the extreme cheering.
1. They make a ton of money. I.E. profits from advertising. I will admit that it is some of the least offensive advertising in the planet but they are ads none the less.
2. Their search engine is closed source. Yep you got it baby cakes every bit as closed source as Microsoft Office and Windows.
3. China.

As I said, I like Google. I would work for them if they offered me a job. They are not perfect and frankly we are not their customers! We are no more their customers than wheat is a farmers customers. They harvest us and sell us to their advertisers. The people that buy Google ads are Google's customers.
We are Google's product.

Secretive?

[kripkenstein]

They are indeed very secretive about their technology

Yes, so I thought. And indeed the article says, "Google is notoriously secretive about its technology", "Google will not comment on its costs". Yet Bill Gates is quoted as saying "Google doesn't have anything magic here. We spend a little bit more per machine. But to do the same tasks, we have less machines.".

A web search doesn't turn up the reference for that quote (and the article doesn't link to it), so it's hard to know the context. But still, it does seem odd. How can Gates know such details, which are supposedly secret? I don't know whether to doubt the truth of his claim, or to wonder about how he could have found it out.

Re:Secretive?

[danskal]

I think that the article means "software technology". Google has in the past been quite open about the hardware it uses. I remember a quote (though I am not enough of a karma whore to dredge it up), where one of the google guys said that if they ran out of server horsepower, they just wandered down to the nearest Kwik-e Mart (TM) and picked up a bunch of new PCs. Most big companies would think to themselves: "We are really big so we must need really big servers", without actually doing the maths of what they really need. So most if not all big sites use much bigger servers (at least in terms of price, if not cpu power, memory, HDD space) than Google. Google's secret is its clustering algorithm, which enables it to spread the load over very many small servers, and still get a lightning fast response back to the user.

Investing that pile of cash

[Jeppe Salvesen]

Google appear to be investing their pile of cash in a very interesting way: They encourage their engineers to spend 20 percent of their time on unrelated work. Since they have some really bright heads in their workforce, they can be said to re-investing their pile of cash into ideas formed by their own employees. You know - all those half-baked, half-related ideas you get when you work on a project: They actually give you time and resources to refine and pursue them. And guess what - some of them turn out to be viable business ideas for the company. So, from a human-resources point-of-view, it's a stroke of genious. They realize more of the potential within their work-force.

They also probably reduce thebrain-drain of their talented employees - since working on Google must be very, very rewarding for someone with an imaginative mind but not a lot of organizational know-how.

You're forgetting one Manufacturer

[hcob$]

Google may be 'the world's fourth-largest maker of computer servers, after Dell, Hewlett-Packard and I.B.M.'.

You're forgetting one Manufacturer: the NSA.

Can Google invent AI?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can Google become an artificial intelligence?
Google certainly has the data to whet the appetite of an AI Mind, but first Google would need an AI Engine such as Mind.Forth to impose order on the data, so that Google would not just store the data but would know the web of data.
Maybe Google will trigger a Technological Singularity.

Re:Silicon? Yes. CPUs? Maybe.

[CastrTroy]

But then just how many specialized chips does one need? With personal computers it's getting a little out of hand. First we have graphics processors, and now physics processors. Oh, and we also have network cards that allow you to offload the entire TCP/IP stack to their own processors. Oh, and sound cards have hardware mixers, so you don't have to mix the sound in software on your general purpose CPU. Oh, and those video capture cards convert everything to mpeg in hardware, so you don't need your CPU for that either. All I need is a special processor for compiling code, and I could go right back to using a 486 as my main processor, since it wouldn't have anything to do anymore.

Re:Google OS

[Overzeetop]

No, the biggest question is, "Will it run microsoft software transparently?"

If I could pop Ubuntu onto my workstations and leverage my existing five-figure investment in MS-only software (hey, I'm only a three person shop), I'd seriously consider taking the plunge. WGA scares the shit out of me, and I'm fully legal from top to bottom. Two to three days of downtime on just one of my machines at the wrong time could cost me my paycheck for the month, and a lost client or two. I bristle at the possibility that I could be forced to pay for a $300 XPpro license just to keep my shop open if WGA makes a mistake - but given the choice between $300 and $3000 in lost revenue to sort the problem out and get reauthorized, you can bet I'll end up grabbing my ankles for Bill and Co. Sad, but true. Prevent that scenario, and I'd be a happy camper.

GPU = Google Processing Unit

[j.leidner]

If Google indeed decides to get involved in hardware (or software that gets compiled into hardware), I welcome the decision, and joyfully look forward to any innovations that they might come up with.

Maybe one day we have a GPU (Google Processing Uni) inside our PCs that has special hardware support for indexing, retrieval and text processing in general. Independently of Google or any particular vendor, the theoretical question that intrigues me is: what operations would you like to have built in to aid the search business?

PageRank in microcode? Porter stemmer as an assembler instruction?

For several decades, CPU design has been driven mostly by traditional numerical concerns. While ranking algorithms certainly are based on numerical principles as well, it remains to be investigated whether there are operations that are worth providing at hardware level, or (more likely) completely new architectures.

Note that their MapReduce paradigm of parallel data processing is close to data flow machines in some sense, and while these were not a success at the time, times have changed (it's always a question of boundary conditions).

What's bad about Google being a broker?

[KWTm]

Hey I like Google and I do think it is a good company but please throw in a few facts along with the extreme cheering.

Okay, you agree that Google is a good company, but now you are going to tell us some ways in which Google is bad, so that overall Google is not as good as we may think. I'm listening.

1. They make a ton of money. I.E. profits from advertising. I will admit that it is some of the least offensive advertising in the planet but they are ads none the less.

So, they profit a lot from ads. I was expecting something bad. Is there something inherently bad about ads? I find ads in general to be obtrusive and annoying, but Google's ads are not. Is it more an ideological stance against ads? (I'm assuming that the thing that's bad is the ads, not the making a ton of money.)

2. Their search engine is closed source. Yep you got it baby cakes every bit as closed source as Microsoft Office and Windows.

That comparison is so off-base! You're comparing apples to religious denominations. "Closed source" and "open source" would apply if they were distributing the software (as in "Microsoft Office and Windows"), but Google isn't distributing their search engine. You're using the negative connotations of "closed source" to create a misleading impression.
You might as well be saying, "John hasn't worked a single day in his life, pays no taxes, and yet lives in daily comfort getting thousands of dollars in government spending." "Really? Who's John?" "My twelve-year-old cousin."

(And don't call me baby cakes.)

3. China.

Wrong.
See? I, too, can make one-word dogmatic pronouncements. The morality of Google's actions in China are hotly debated here on Slashdot and elsewhere. Since you don't bother to qualify your one-word non-sentence, I won't qualify mine.

They are not perfect and frankly we are not their customers! We are no more their customers than wheat is a farmers customers. They harvest us and sell us to their advertisers. The people that buy Google ads are Google's customers.

Here again, you imply, without explanation something inherently bad about the situation. So what if we are not their customers?

I think of Google as a broker: they profit by connecting us to what we need. Just as a real estate agent connects you to the sellers of your dream home (hey, you the buyer are not the real estate agent's customer!) or a headhunter connects you to that job you've been looking for, so Google connects us to the information we need. This is one connection, but they don't directly profit from it. The other connection is that they connect their advertisers to us. They do profit from this.

It sounds like you are opposed to them "harvest[ing] us and sell[ing] us to their advertisers", but Google only profits when you follow their offered links. You have a choice about whether to use Google as a search engine, and even when you do, you have a choice about whether to follow their offered links.

It's like you're saying, "Damn, I asked the real estate agent to find me a decent house, and she did! I mean, those agents just harvest us house buyers and sell them en masse to the sellers! Damn those real estate agents for doing what we ask!"

I agree that Google is not perfect, but nowhere in your posting do you say why you think so.

Re:What's bad about Google being a broker?

[LWATCDR]

"That comparison is so off-base! You're comparing apples to religious denominations. "Closed source" and "open source" would apply if they were distributing the software (as in "Microsoft Office and Windows"), but Google isn't distributing their search engine. You're using the negative connotations of "closed source" to create a misleading impression."
I think they are distributing it.
http://www.google.com/enterprise/gsa/
I don't think that closed source is a bad thing. Some do but I really don't. I just also want to point out that Google is no different than Microsoft as far as selling closed source software.
Let's not forget that Google toolbar, Google Desktop, Google Earth, and gTalk are all closed source programs.
I really do not think that Google is bad. There censoring content in china I feel is the wrong thing to do. Many people agree with that.
Again I don't have trouble with ads. I have trouble that the fantasy that Google is putting it's customers ahead of profit when that is really not true.
I also wanted to clear up the idea that the people that use Google are in fact it's customers. We are Google's product. Again I don't think that is a bad thing. Just like many other things that get harvested Google provides us with what we want and then sells us off for a profit.