Thursday, December 02, 2010

Why do we say 'Google' instead of 'search'?

because it has become synonymous to search, just like 'Hoover' for vacuuming and 'Xerox' for photocopying, many years ago. These days, some kids thought the house becomes clean overnight because of some fairies, while copying refers to 'copy and paste' or using 'Bluetooth' from one gadget to another!

Anyway, if I want to search for something I have read in The Star for instance, I would rather type in 'thestaronline' and the relevant word or phrase, and 'Google' it, instead of searching within thestaronline website! My friend KC emailed me this:

"This bit of news is dated back in 2009, but still astonishing.

I never knew that a Google search can require that much processing power. I always thought that it's just an efficient search programming algorithm that Google has somehow discovered. Maybe it is, but just that amazing that it requires so many PCs to do it. No wonder a Google search is super fast compared to Bing and others."

Google Uses 1000 Computers for a Single Search Query
February 21, 2009

"On WSDM 2009, Jeff Dean, a Google employee, shared some information about Google’s growth since 1999. According to him, latency has gone down from 1 second to 200ms, while now there are 1000 times more search queries. Back in 1999 they were using 12 machines to handle a query and now they use even up to 1000. This is mostly because of the latency improvement and the huge index it has, compared to the one in 1999.

Do you even imagine how much energy those 1000 machines consume ? If you want tosave the world from global warming, please stop searching for “Paris Hilton’s finger nail porn” anymore and make it more useful."


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