The New York Times had a great article on Google over the break. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google had built their computers and developed software that was more efficient than anything in the market at that time. They had done this to save money.
Even though Google has plenty of money now, they still use the same philosophy of building their own machines. Google is building its data centers closer to users in order to give faster response times.
Their competitors Microsoft and Yahoo write their own software but use more name brand systems for their hardware. As it says in the article Google is just as much about infrastructure as it is a search engine. Every piece of the puzzle is important in order to create a successful product.
By continuing to build computers Google’s operating cost is lower than other Internet companies and much less than large corporations.
Bill Gates says their machines cost a little more, but they are able to complete the same tasks with less machines.
Google took supercomputing and specialized it for search engine technology.
Google realizes that hardware will fail and they don’t consider it as a disadvantage. The software technology shifts from failing machines to those that are working until the hardware is replaced.
They use a method of failover where a failed machine can just be replicated and replaced. Each machine holds a certain amount of data and each piece of data is replicated across multiple machines. It is a common form of clustering.
There’s no doubt that Google is good at what they do. Their plan of action in search is well thought out and efficient. This is probably one of the reasons why it is on top and its hard for other companies to break into the competition. Only time will tell if someone else will come up with a creative idea just to make this product better.
