google yesterday and google today

[shirwa_24]

Google yesterday.

 

 

Google’s First Production Server, was located at Stanford University (1998),includes these specifications:

 

• 1 Sun Ultra II with dual 200 MHz processors, and 256MB of RAM. This was the main machine for the original Backrub system.
• 2 x 300 MHz Dual Pentium II Servers donated by Intel, they included 512MB of RAM and 9 x 9GB hard drives between the two. It was on these that the main search ran.
• Two additional boxes included 3 x 9GB hard drives and 6 x 4GB hard drives respectively (the original storage for Backrub). These were attached to the Sun Ultra II.
• IBM disk expansion box with another 8 x 9GB hard drives donated by IBM.
• Homemade disk box which contained 10 x 9GB SCSI hard drives.

Google today

 

Though the numbers are not publicly known, some people estimate that Google maintains over 450,000 servers, arranged in racks located in clusters in cities around the world

 

[Curly]

nice post, just to show what could two kids in garage do with the thanks of Opensource software!

[Jacaylbaro]

Just to show if people are committed then they can progress magically ,,,,,,,

[Geel_jire]

Google might be put out of business soon by other kids who came up with another great idea

 

Originally posted by Geel_jire:

Today I was reading about this new search engine called 'Powerset' if it does accomplish what it is intended for .... it will most likely replace Google as the primary search engine for most people on the web.

 

The problem with current search engine technologies is:

 

1- They index content of the page,tags,titles so if somebody searches for a word that is in one of the aforementioned parts of a site all the engine has to do is a quick n dirty pattern matching algorithm.

 

2- lack of abstraction .. for anybody who is skilled in using search engines you have probably picked up a few technical terms such as:

 

- "Key words" (self explanatory)

 

- AND (logical)all of the words must be in the results e.g [tokyo AND earthquake]

 

-OR (logical)either of the words may be in the result e.g [tokyo OR earhquake ] (you can also substitue OR with +)

 

-Negation (should not be included in the result) suppose every time you put in [tokyo AND/OR earthquake] you also get earthquakes all over japan you can explicitly negate them e.g [tokyo AND earthquake -kyoto]

 

-constant strings (words between "") when you want to retrieve an exact phrase in the result e.g [The last day of]

 

you may not consider these terms technical but they are part of the terminology of computer programming languages and boolean algebra. One of the main goals of a software engineer is to abstract as much as possible the user should be able to use the software without knowing or caring about implementation details such as logical operators.

 

Powerset proposes to solve these problems by

 

quote:Powerset is indexing web pages much differently than normal search engines, which generally just record content to match against keyword queries. Instead, Powerset is trying to understand the content on the page so that it can be matched meaningfully to queries later. Even queries that don’t use matching words.

 

and it uses Natural language processing i.e it can accept as input natural language for example in a traditional search engine you would plug in [tokyo,earthquakes] to find out when tokyo was hit by an earthquake but in natural language processing scenario you could do [when did earthquakes hit tokyo ?] and get a much more detailed answer one of the reasons why is ... natural language processing has the ability to work with synonyms i.e the query 'when did earthquakes hit tokyo' will be treated exactly the same as when did earthquakes hit/strike/impact/stagger tokyo thereby getting multiple searches in 1 go

 

the problems facing it in short term is ... it has to index the entire web which can take a long time but currently it has indexed all of wikipedia so you can use for that ... if it does manage to work as expected this will benefit people who spend hours sifting through millions of google results for what they are looking for.

 

A more detailed explanation of how it works including a short video here

 

and the actual engine : powerset