| The Magic
that makes Google tick; Google's vice-president
of engineering was in London this week to talk to potential
recruits about just what lies behind that search page. The
numbers alone are enough to make your eyes water.
• Over four billion Web pages, each an average of 10KB,
all fully indexed (now 8 Billion ...)
• 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
It is one of the largest computing projects on the planet,
arguably employing more computers than any other single, fully
managed system (we're not counting distributed computing projects
here), some 200 computer science PhDs, and 600 other computer
scientists.
And it is all hidden behind a deceptively simple, white, Web
page that contains a single one-line text box and a button
that says Google Search. ZDNET
more
Google PageRank Entertaining Us? There
has been a rumor going around that Google's PageRank Toolbar
display should only be used for entertainment, meaning that
the green bar is not an accurate account of a site's PageRank.
According to Barry Schwartz of SearchEngineRoundTable.com,
a post showed up on the SearchEngineWatch
forum from an individual claiming to have inside knowledge
concerning the PageRank display on Google's toolbar. As indicated
in the post: "The PageRank that is displayed in the Google
Toolbar is for entertainment purposes only. Due to repeated
attempts by hackers to access this data, Google updates the
PageRank data very infrequently because is it not secure.
On average, the PR that is displayed in the Google Toolbar
is several months old. If the toolbar is showing a PR of zero,
this is because the user is visiting a new URL that hasn't
been updated in the last update."
GoogleGuy
has commented on this forum post at this site and others saying:
"I'd strongly disagree with the statement that the toolbar
PageRank is for "entertainment purposes only"--millions
of toolbar users use the PageRank display to judge the quality
of pages. I think it's also a little irresponsible to quote
JohnGalt claiming to talk to some random person at Google,
and then for you to quote it as a reponse from Google, which
makes it sound more official. I'm happy to refute that this
is any sort of official stance."
There is certainly a tendency for people to obsess about
PR and link popularity, I say focus on your actual rankings!
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