How does Google do it? 261
Doc Tagle writes "With Google reportedly on the verge of going public, more and more people want to know what makes Google tick. The Observer, serves up the answers to our questions."
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How does Google do it?
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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.
Openness is the first casualty of going public?! (Score:4, Insightful)
OK - I can (perhaps) see this as being the case prior to an IPO, but that statement can't be true after it has happened...
I mean....surely once they've gone public, they'll be obliged to detail and list the sort of information that the article postulates about? The shareholders would be entitled to know how many servers google has, what their specifications are, and what their current commercial strategy is.....surely?!
Here (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe this is the reason after all, but I think it's more about Google being simple, smart and clean. They play fair (no browser interstitials, no sneaky crap, no registration necessary...etc); I would equate Google's victory thusfar to a kind of no-nonsense attitude to business, always, no-exception.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you do not believe me, buy a share of GE. Pick up the phone, call Investor Relations and ask them how many Unix computers they have and what OS and patch level they run.
Re:Google is faltering (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmm... are they using a 32-bit integer to keep the page count?
2^32 = 4.294 billion, pretty close to 4.285 billion pages.
Newbies...
Google can't do it: phrase searches (Score:0, Insightful)
Interestingly, a9.com, which copied Google, contains the same search errors.
Re:Interesting (Score:3, Insightful)
How many times have you run a search and seen a link at the bottom that says something like "Google removed information from this search that is redundant to information already displayed on the page" (Can't remember exactly what it says right now). Usually, there's nothing valuable in the hidden links - why index them at all?
Re:Here (Score:5, Insightful)
And the fact that there are so many articles, from people that just can't understand why google is successful, just goes to show you how screwed we all are...
Practically everyone in business is determined to be as evil as possible torwards their customers (and employees) and assume that anybody doing anything else must be doing something wrong, no matter what all other indicators may say.
For a great example, read The Wal-Mart Myth [guerrillanews.com].
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:3, Insightful)
With google: before I give them my money, I would like to know how many servers they have, how close to capacity they are, what softwares they use (compatibility issues).
Honest reporting of operations lets an investor make an intelligent decision about their money and helps avoid boiler-room companies.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:5, Insightful)
Going public WILL expose the siginificant portion of Google technology, more sp when it has to do with hardware.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:5, Insightful)
With Google, their entire "business" - their means of generating cash flow - relies on sheer quantity of computing muscle and high performance software for their search databases. With GE, their business is making lightbulbs, dishwashers, hair dryers, electric motors and any more of thousands of different products used in residential, commercial and industrial settings. How many Unix computers they have in all their offices around the world is a causality of doing business, not their means of doing business.
I'm sure if you asked the GE Investor Relations department something relevant about how their business operates, you might get somewhere.
=Smidge=
Re:Two Thingies (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:3, Insightful)
Be reasonable.
Financial information is important, their business plan is important, it is probably important to know that they are running Linux so that SCO-type problems can be factored in. The sort of fine technical details the Observer goes into are totally irrelevant, just an incidental business expense. We know that it all works and that Google are on top of what they do. That is what matters.
Re:Linux needs more patching? Does it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Baumi
Re:They have built an amazing system using Linux.. (Score:3, Insightful)
The service is free, and they're really good at what they do. I would say I'd be lost without google on the internet, but really this compliment goes for lots of search engines - I'm really very grateful this sort of service still exists for free (well, with ads.)
Unless you want to talk about cures for diseases through protien folding simulations, I can't think of a better way for this hardware to be used, such that it begets a greater net benefit.
"serves up the answers to our questions"??? (Score:2, Insightful)
the article never answered any of our questions - heck, i even looked for a "Page 2" link after reading the entire thing, sadly, the article ended w/o even attempting to answer its own questions.
Re:The Google Might Be Falling (Score:1, Insightful)
BTW, it's Orkut [orkut.com]. Google is showing themselves as having excellent business and marketing savvy by putting out the press release on April Fool's Day. What better way to stir up speculation and cause a lot of buzz by releasing something which sounds like it could be a joke, or it just might be true. They probably received much more exposure by releasing a flippant press release on April 1st which turned out to be true, compared to various other companies which only had various pranks.
I think you can safely put the tinfoil hat away. Google's business is quite clear. Have an awesome search engine and other services. Charge advertisers for listings. It's basically eBay in a search engine. eBay gets a lot more revenue from each transaction than Google does, but Google makes it up bigtime on volume.
Re:I've though about this a bit (Score:3, Insightful)
Even better, instead of backup just crawl the pages again in the event of a lost disk. Of course some data needs to be in multiple places for performance reasons, but not all data are accessed frequently. How often do you think they will need the page with the lowest rank? (OK, I know there will probably be a lot with exactly the same rank, but you get the idea).
load software via NFS at node bootup
There are better protocols for this than NFS. But when you build a cluster this size, you surely want boxes, that can netboot of of the box. Actually that means you will need to use DHCP and TFTP. Security of the DHCP and TFTP servers is going to be very critical.
use nodes just to store data; keep software in RAM for speed
I wouldn't worry about the speed. Linux is going to do fine. But since they probably netboot and download kernel and a ramdisk from a server, it is of course going to be kept in ram. Now I wonder, does it all run of an initial ramdisk?
Re:Google is faltering (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Google can't do it: phrase searches (Score:5, Insightful)
"To be or not to be"
and I honestly can't see what you are going on about: of the first ten results, eight highlighted the phrase in the page synopsis, one used the phrase as a domain name, and one included the parital phrase "...Or Not To Be."
Note the elipsis on that last one: it alludes to a larger portion of text preceding the printed portion. And the domain-name was found even though the spaces were omitted.
Those aren't irregular results: those are highly intelligent results.
Just because they aren't deterministic enough for you to plug them into a piece of code of your own construction (without compensating Google) doesn't mean that they don't fulfill the purpose of the web search.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:3, Insightful)
The real fact of the matter is, they have custom software that they run. The number of systems, speed, memory and OSs are simply a byproduct of what they really offer: a service.
Google is no different. They offer a service. As long as they are profitable, as an investor, I could care less if the systems were running on Dell's, White Boxes, Mac, or Commodore-64s. They have found a way to make the business run on the systems they have.
they don't have to path and update very often (Score:3, Insightful)
Come on, the nodes in their clusters are not desktop computers with office software on it.
The system running these machines are rather very stipped down: They only need very few applications and a very simple kernel (not many device drivers, maybe no graphic card driver, ...).
Furthermore there are no local users on the the machines -> many security flaws wont affect the integrity. And remote holes in the kernel occur not very often.
And above all these cluster nodes are certaily shielded by some sort of firewall. Therefore they don't have to care for network security themselves.
All in all: I believe that you need to update such machines rather infrequent. At least not for security reasons.
Titus
Re:The Google Might Be Falling (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, you do realize that Google already makes a profit [businessweek.com], don't you? I daresay the IPO will puff the value of the company up beyond the rational amount, but that's not 'Enron' -- if you are going to use buzzwords, use the right ones. Enron was a case of internal actors in the company using financial games to siphon off profits and inflate the value of the company on the books. You accusing Google of financial fraud? If you are going to use a buzzword, use 'Yahoo' or something -- a solid company that got its stock price puffed up excessively due to investor mania.
How the hell did this get moderated up, except as 'Funny'?
Re:The Google Might Be Falling (Score:4, Insightful)
Correction, the ad model has proven to be of dubious effectiveness with companies that have no credibility.
Google is perhaps the most trusted company on the net today, and with the traffic they get, I'm not surprised at all that they can support all their financial needs with ad revenue, especially with some of the big bucks that large companies dump into advertising with Google. I challenge you to show evidence showing that their advertising business model cannot support their costs, because so far you've done nothing but toss up tin-foil hat ideas without any proof to back it up, and as someone else so kindly pointed out to you, Google is ALREADY in the black.