When Arthur C. Clarke said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, he was alluding to the trick of hiding the complexity of the job from the audience, or the user. Nobody hides the complexity of the job better than Google does ....
Google is, in many ways, exactly what we expected computers to be forty or fifty years ago -- near-instantaneous return of any information requested. In some ways, if it's not on Google, it doesn't actually exist, as far as the Internet is concerned. While Google has refrained from being a portal per se, for many people, it is the most important interface to the Net.
The statistics -- the non-magical bits -- behind Google is astonishing.
* Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB, all fully indexed
* Up to 2,000 PCs in a cluster
* Over 30 clusters
* 104 interface languages including Klingon and Tagalog
* One petabyte of data in a cluster -- so much that hard disk error rates of 10**-15 begin to be a real issue
* Sustained transfer rates of 2Gbps in a cluster
* An expectation that two machines will fail every day in each of the larger clusters
* No complete system failure since February 2000
Amazing.
Filed under :: Hi-Tech
Actually, they recently increased their count to about 8 b. If you go now you can see that it says 8,058,044,651.