How can Google be so fast?

Question

What are the technologies and programming decisions that make Google able to serve a query so fast?

Every time I search something (one of the several times per day) it always amazes me how they serve the results in near or less than 1 second time. What sort of configuration and algorithms could they have in place that accomplishes this?

Side note: It is kind of overwhelming thinking that even if I was to put a desktop application and use it on my machine probably would not be half as fast as Google. Keep on learning I say.

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Here are some of the great answers and pointers provided:

• Google Platform
• Map Reduce
• Algorithms carefully crafted
• Hardware - cluster farms and massive number of cheap computers
• Caching and Load Balancing
• Google File System

Answer 1

Latency is killed by disk accesses. Hence it's reasonable to believe that all data used to answer queries is kept in memory. This implies thousands of servers, each replicating one of many shards. Therefore the critical path for search is unlikely to hit any of their flagship distributed systems technologies GFS, MapReduce or BigTable. These will be used to process crawler results, crudely.

The handy thing about search is that there's no need to have either strongly consistent results or completely up-to-date data, so Google are not prevented from responding to a query because a more up-to-date search result has become available.

So a possible architecture is quite simple: front end servers process the query, normalising it (possibly by stripping out stop words etc.) then distributing it to whatever subset of replicas owns that part of the query space (an alternative architecture is to split the data up by web pages, so that one of every replica set needs to be contacted for every query). Many, many replicas are probably queried, and the quickest responses win. Each replica has an index mapping queries (or individual query terms) to documents which they can use to look up results in memory very quickly. If different results come back from different sources, the front-end server can rank them as it spits out the html.

Note that this is probably a long way different from what Google actually do - they will have engineered the life out of this system so there may be more caches in strange areas, weird indexes and some kind of funky load-balancing scheme amongst other possible differences.

Answer 2

It's a bit too much to put it in one answer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform