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."
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson
Google is faltering (Score:3, Interesting)
Google has recently removed tens of thousands of "duplicate content" sites from its index - where "duplicate content" is as simple as being an affiliate site (e.g. Amazon) and having the same textual item descriptions as many other sites.
Google is now in the process of dropping millions of link records from its index, presumably to make room for more pages.
Google is wavering.
Gmail is a distraction, a venture into some other space to keep people from noticing that their search product is degrading.
May she last as long as possible...
My theory: (Score:1, Interesting)
They have built an amazing system using Linux... (Score:2, Interesting)
Article didn't say much (Score:5, Interesting)
-Vic
Soon to be everything (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting (Score:4, Interesting)
Can you back up your assertions that Google's index is full? It's a rather interesting theory, and perhaps an explanation for all the tweaking they've done lately.
Two Thingies (Score:5, Interesting)
Two -- If you want your pages indexed faster and more frequently, sign-up and place a google adsense ad on your page. Many webmasters believe that google is having to index so many adsense pages... that is difficult for google to add many more non-ad driven pages.
Just sign up for adsense and run it a couple of weeks while you build your site. After google has spidered your site well, then just drop adsense.
Good luck. I would love to hear any of your google-related tricks.
AC
Re:Huh? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why would a shareholder care about server specifications? Investing is all about money. Read any quarterly report from a public company. Income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow are the primary interests on the numbers side as well as a general roadmap of where the company's heading. Warren Buffett doesn't care if each server has two 80 GB drives, or whether they have four 250 GB drives per server. The only thing that matters is that there are competent people to handle these kinds of "dirty details" that an investor doesn't give a rats ass about.
Take a look at the kinds of information [yahoo.com] you could expect from Google's quarterly reports.
I've though about this a bit (Score:3, Interesting)
Putting on my computer scientist hat I would guess:
- instead of backup, hold data in multiple places at once
- use a "cascaded rsync" to trickle software changes to thousands of nodes
- then load software via NFS at node bootup
- use nodes just to store data; keep software in RAM for speed
Just a few thoughts.
google instant messenger, or... (Score:4, Interesting)
So far we know they have just a cubic load of servers, the most on the planet most likely with one private company. The government probably has more, but it's a mish mash of them, not near as sleek or coordinated, AFAIK. What COULD be next with them, practical cheap 50 dollar thin clinets that you could do a TON on, using distributed computing, from games to communication to running any business? With tech savvy like they got and their already established heavy hardware base and heavy committment to R&D, they could just 'splode with an extra 25 billion in cash all of a sudden from an IPO. OR, the money could get to them and they become just another weird company that forgets it's roots as "brains come first" and switch to "marketing crap comes first" like certain other unnamed megacorps do now.
Interesting times
Re:Google is faltering (Score:1, Interesting)
Supplmental Result (Score:4, Interesting)
The best evidence is doing a search which returns results which say "Supplemental Result" next to them. That'll be coming from a second document store I'd guess.
Linux needs more patching? Does it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Huh? Does it!? Since when? I like these throw-away lines the media people dish out. What is their basis for this statement? Even when they see Linux obviously succeeding, they dish out a statement like this.
I certainly don't have to patch my Linux boxes as frequently as my Windows boxes. Actually... no... wait, they're right! I only need to patch Windows once. Ctrl-Alt-Del -> Boot Debian CD.
Re:The "searching xxx web pages" count (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Supplmental Result (Score:5, Interesting)
By the way, for supplemental result... By doing a quick keyword search on Google using my domain name, I'm led to believe that pages marked "Supplemental Result" are pages that look like search results. That is, they aren't filled with any real content, other than search results from other engines. Results that could "supplement" your "result" from Google.
The linked article is shit (Score:1, Interesting)
> it means you're all Linux users.
What is that - guilt by association?
>how do you implement security patches and operating-system upgrades (much more frequent in Linux than in proprietary systems from Microsoft or Sun) on thousands of servers without causing disruption to service?
You don't implement any security patches and upgrades because those systems are used only by Web servers; it's not like some Web client will hack into their servers... You boot thousands of servers from NFS or such; you upgrade system images once a quarter, together with Google's own software.
>yet achieves 100 per cent uptime.
Uptime of what? Of www.google.com, using round-robin load balancing to several geographically dispersed data centers. What's the big deal about that?
But I've seen 404 on www.google.com and the paid AdWords Admin Web is down quite often(anyone who ever used it knows what I'm talking about).
The Google Might Be Falling (Score:2, Interesting)
The more and more I look at it, the more and more I fear Google is just nothing more then a very well calculated shill game; the Enron of technology IPOs...
Pretty much everyone who uses the internet loves Google and we do so for a combination of three compelling reasons; First off, Google offers up what is basically the best search engine on the internet. It isn't perfect, it doesn't work all the time but it is the best thing out there right now. Second, they offer this high-quality search service without all the excess bullshit that got tacked onto all of the other search engines on the market in the
The thing that gives me the heeby geebies about Google is how they make all of this look so effortless. Okurit just sort of popped out of the open one day. gMail appeared on April 1 with such an "effortless" air about it all that Google didn't even bother to take the press release seriously. We keep hearing these cryptic references from the company about some overwhelmingly massive amount of computing power they have and how their kabul of PhDs has it humming along with levels of efficiency that are a world beyond most everything else out there.
All of this has made for a very pumped up environment for an IPO, but we still have yet to get an answer to the question "What is Google's business model?" I "google" words all day. I have an Okurit account that I use. I even use Google as a quick and dirty calculator. When it opens up, I will have a couple of gMail accounts. The problem is, I've never paid these people a single penny for ANY of this. How the hell are they going to make money?
Sure, we can say that Google has integrated advertising within the search results, but the advertising model has always proven to be of dubious effectiveness at best. Google has an enterprise search division, but the cost of their Google Appliance is a pittance compared to the sort of money big time enterprise software companies like Oracle and SAP are making, how can they survive on that revenue stream and pay the bandwidth bills for all of the free services they offer to the public?
We always tend to answer these questions with an "I don't know, but Google must be doing something right." Google works very hard to continue to fuel the fire that they are doing something paradigm shifting with all of those PhDs they have on the payroll, and how many servers they have, and how they can just sort of effortlessly announce 1gb free email accounts. We keep drawing up the impression that these guys must have something HUGE up their sleeves, and they have us salivating for the IPO so we too can be part of it.
Very soon, Google executives are going to pile onto a Gulfstream V and do a roadshow for big time investment houses and institutional investors and they are going to be trying to convince these guys to buy Google IPO. They are going to be asked exactly what sort of business model Google is going to be pushing and one of two things is going to happen:
- Google will c
Re:Also censoring... (Score:1, Interesting)
SafeSearch IS A FILTERED SEARCH. Shit happens this is the limits of technology, which is why you have to take extra steps to use it. Obviously it's going to have false hits, but that's life. Nothings perfect and it's NOT GOOGLE'S FAULT.
And the anti-jewish site?
Well, that's just plain bullshit. Some FUD spread by a reporter trying to get his name and his article spread around.
If you don't like it, use Altavista.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:2, Interesting)
"When I visited the company in January, the screen said that Akamai was serving 591,763 hits per second, with 14,372 CPUs online, 14,563 gigahertz of total processing power, and 650 terabytes of total storage. On April 14 [2004], the number had jumped to a peak rate of 900,000 hits per second and 43.71 billion requests delivered in a 24-hour period."
From this article [technologyreview.com].
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:3, Interesting)
No, they have to have people who understand technical details to be able to produce legitimate forecasts of output. I'm sure there are people who analyize how many workers and robots Ford has to estimate how many cars they can produce, right? So the equvilent is how many coders and systems Google has, no?
Well if they don't, big brokerage houses can reply and I will consider the most lucrative offer.
Number of results? (Score:1, Interesting)
Results 1 - 10 of about 5,690,000,000 for the [definition]. (0.11 seconds)
But Google homepage says:
Searching 4,285,199,774 web pages
Is there a difference?
Google full? Or just tweeking the algorithm? (Score:3, Interesting)
Google is now in the process of dropping millions of link records from its index, presumably to make room for more pages.
It's possible that the index is full, but I would imagine that they would have seen this coming long ago, as it "filled up", and taken measures. What's more likely behind the elimination of duplicate pages is that more and more people have been complaining about the search results relevancy and how site owners have been taking advantage of certain known flaws in the Google algorithm. So, they are taking steps to fix the algorithm, and kill off all the fake sites.
Google linux (Score:0, Interesting)
If work is defined as 'The expenditure of energy to the benefit of others that cannot be achieved by automation, then not many people accumulate money by honourable actions. In other words they get paid without doing something for it.
The lads at google have done a marvelous job, an all the greedy fat capitalist bastards want to do is stick their noses in the trough, an suck their sustenance. Whilst shagging the planet.
IPO signals more World Poker Tour participants (Score:3, Interesting)
So one has to assume the IPO is the first phase of the principals "cashing out". The press will probably signal this as a sign of the next dot com boom, and a bunch of nerds within the company will suddenly become millionaires, and subsequently quit their job and open up a Bed & Breakfast in some obscure town or join the World Poker Tour. There goes the talent.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Supplmental Result (Score:3, Interesting)
The above is from GoogleGuy in this thread [webmasterworld.com] on WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com].
(I think you may need to copy/paste the link, I'm not sure)
Why 4.285 billion? (Score:5, Interesting)
Results 1 - 10 of about 5,750,000,000 for the [definition]. (0.11 seconds)
Doesn't that imply more than 4.285 billion?
This wil be the begining of the end for Google (Score:2, Interesting)
You get your initial investment, which seems great, but then you sell your soul. You will be forced to "cut the fat" and "yeild higher short-term profits" and all resarch projects that make tech companies great will vanish.
This has happened with almost every great American tech company. How often do we see the type of reasearch that came out of Bell Labs today? We don't, instead we see former reasearchers that were once considered the "cream de la cream" of computer scientists out looking for work (most taking up teaching positions at universities).
Along with the presure of Wallstreet, Microsoft will be releasing their direct competitor to Google soon and they will be pushing hard for industry domination.
Wallstreet is the reason that our tech jobs are going to India, Wallstreet is the reason that America is slowly becoming less and less of the technological superpower that it used to be.
IMHO, Google should stay out of Wallstreet and keep doing what it has been doing.
Then again, there are plenty of examples of companies that had alot of hype for an IPO and are still strong and innovating today, VA Linux Systems for example, oh, I mean VA Software, and their one product that is slowly being made obsoleete by Free and Open Source alternitives.
Re:Openness is the first casualty of going public? (Score:3, Interesting)
Actually, their means of generating cash flow relies on how beneficial advertisers feel it is to advertise on Google.