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.

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"?

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.

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.

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: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.