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How Google Works

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google, the company must still work through common business problems such as reporting revenue and tracking projects. But it sometimes addresses those needs in unconventional—yet highly efficient—ways. Others are starting to follow its lead. Here's why.

With his unruly hair dipping across his forehead, Douglas Merrill walks up to the lectern set up in a ballroom of the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, looking like a slightly rumpled university professor about to start a lecture. In fact, he is here on this April morning to talk about his work as director of internal technology for Google to a crowd of chief information officers gathered at a breakfast sponsored by local recruiting firm Phoenix Staffing.

Google, the secretive, extraordinarily successful $6.1 billion global search engine company, is one of the most recognized brands in the world. Yet it selectively discusses its innovative information management infrastructure—which is based on one of the largest distributed computing/grid systems in the world.

Merrill is about to give his audience a rare glimpse into the future according to Google, and explain the workings of the company and the computer systems behind it.

For all the razzle-dazzle surrounding Google—everything from the press it gets for its bring-your-dog-to-work casual workplace, to its stock price, market share, dizzying array of beta product launches and its death-match competition with Microsoft—it must also solve more basic issues like billing, collection, reporting revenue, tracking projects, hiring contractors, recruiting and evaluating employees, and managing videoconferencing systems—in other words, common business problems.

But this does not mean that Google solves these problems in a conventional way, as Merrill is about to explain.

"We're about not ever accepting that the way something has been done in the past is necessarily the best way to do it today," he says.

Among other things, that means that Google often doesn't deploy standard business applications on standard hardware. Instead, it may use the same text parsing technology that drives its search engine to extract application input from an e-mail, rather than a conventional user interface based on data entry forms. Instead of deploying an application to a conventional server, Merrill may deploy it to a proprietary server-clustering infrastructure that runs across its worldwide data centers.

Google runs on hundreds of thousands of servers—by one estimate, in excess of 450,000—racked up in thousands of clusters in dozens of data centers around the world. It has data centers in Dublin, Ireland; in Virginia; and in California, where it just acquired the million-square-foot headquarters it had been leasing. It recently opened a new center in Atlanta, and is currently building two football-field-sized centers in The Dalles, Ore.

By having its servers and data centers distributed geographically, Google delivers faster performance to its worldwide audience, because the speed of the connection between any two computers on the Internet is partly a factor of the speed of light, as well as delays caused by network switches and routers. And although search is still Google's big moneymaker, those servers are also running a fast-expanding family of other applications like Gmail, Blogger, and now even Web-based word processors and spreadsheets.

That's why there is so much speculation about Google the Microsoft-killer, the latest firm nominated to drive everything to the Web and make the Windows desktop irrelevant. Whether or not you believe that, it's certainly true that Google and Microsoft are banging heads. Microsoft expects to make about a $1.5 billion capital investment in server and data structure infrastructure this year. Google is likely to spend at least as much to maintain its lead, following a $838 million investment in 2005.

And at Google, large-scale systems technology is all-important. In 2005, it indexed 8 billion Web pages. Meanwhile, its market share continues to soar. According to a recent ComScore Networks qSearch survey, Google's market share for search among U.S. Internet users reached 43% in April, compared with 28% for Yahoo and 12.9% for The Microsoft Network (MSN).

And Google's market share is growing; a year ago, it was 36.5%. The same survey indicates that Americans conducted 6.6 billion searches online in April, up 4% from the previous month. Google sites led the pack with 2.9 billion search queries performed, followed by Yahoo sites (1.9 billion) and MSN-Microsoft (858 million).

This growth is driven by an abundance of scalable technology. As Google noted in its most recent annual report filing with the SEC: "Our business relies on our software and hardware infrastructure, which provides substantial computing resources at low cost. We currently use a combination of off-the-shelf and custom software running on clusters of commodity computers. Our considerable investment in developing this infrastructure has produced several key benefits. It simplifies the storage and processing of large amounts of data, eases the deployment and operation of large-scale global products and services, and automates much of the administration of large-scale clusters of computers."

Google buys, rather than leases, computer equipment for maximum control over its infrastructure. Google chief executive officer Eric Schmidt defended that strategy in a May 31 call with financial analysts. "We believe we get tremendous competitive advantage by essentially building our own infrastructures," he said.

Google does more than simply buy lots of PC-class servers and stuff them in racks, Schmidt said: "We're really building what we think of internally as supercomputers."

Because Google operates at such an extreme scale, it's a system worth studying, particularly if your organization is pursuing or evaluating the grid computing strategy, in which high-end computing tasks are performed by many low-cost computers working in tandem.

Despite boasting about this infrastructure, Google turned down requests for interviews with its designers, as well as for a follow-up interview with Merrill. Merrill did answer questions during his presentation in Phoenix, however, and the division of the company that sells the Google Search Appliance helped fill in a few blanks.

In general, Google has a split personality when it comes to questions about its back-end systems. To the media, its answer is, "Sorry, we don't talk about our infrastructure." Yet, Google engineers crack the door open wider when addressing computer science audiences, such as rooms full of graduate students whom it is interested in recruiting. As a result, sources for this story included technical presentations available from the University of Washington Web site, as well as other technical conference presentations, and papers published by Google's research arm, Google Labs.

How to Start Your Own Online Business in a Week without a Product and Start Profiting from it while You are in Vacation

Do you know what the quickest and proven way to make money online is?

How do you manage your online business if you are a complete beginner and don’t have yet your own product?

How do you manage your online business such that your time investment goes essentially in the setup process and then you can benefit from it (almost) on autopilot?

Well, this may come as a surprise to you, but the answer to these three apparently different questions is the same.

We are talking, of course, about Affiliate Marketing, but not simply Affiliate Marketing.

If you don’t know, Affiliate Marketing is about making money on sales other people are doing on their product with customers referred by you. You send people to the marketer site through your own special link and if they buy, then you get a commission.

Well, talking of simply Affiliate Marketing is dangerous. Some people do think it’s all that. Probably this is really the easiest and fastest way to start, but for sure you are not going to make any money with it unless you are very smart. Often (at the current level of competition) you have to try more than 20 products before finding a money maker or even be able to build your own very first sale. Are you going to persist that long?

There is a simple way to overcome this drawback and let you earn your money while you are in vacation. Just learn the Turnkey Money Machine subscribing to our free ecourse with the form at the top.

del.icio.us as a search engine

By Rachel Cunliffe

I was driving around in the intense heat this afternoon with my husband, talking to him about the whole “Me first” concept. I was talking about how lately I’ve been using del.icio.us as a search engine more and more. It’s probably not suitable for all types of searches just yet, but are the links on delicious of a better quality and more relevant to me than, say, on Google?

Are relevant links being discovered faster by the massive del.icio.us user-base than search bots? Are there less link-farms and unnaturally-rank-inflated sites on del.icio.us?

A (non-scientific sample of 1) example. I’m looking for some new fonts and search for “fonts”.

Google returns about 59,600,000 results. del.icio.us returns 14,099 results.

More doesn’t necessarily mean better.

del.icio.us Top 10:

  1. http://www.goodfonts.org/
  2. http://typetester.maratz.com/
  3. http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-best-license-free-official-fonts
  4. http://fontleech.com/
  5. http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts.html
  6. http://www.dafont.com/en/
  7. http://www.typenow.net/themed.htm
  8. http://www.graphicsngraphicdesign.com/hugelistfreefontssites
  9. http://simplythebest.net/fonts/index.html
 10. http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/

Google’s Top 10:

  1. http://www.1001freefonts.com/
  2. http://www.fonts.com/
  3. http://www.acidfonts.com/
  4. http://www.larabiefonts.com/
  5. http://www.1001fonts.com/
  6. http://www.abstractfonts.com/
  7. http://www.dafont.com/
  8. http://www.fontfreak.com/
  9. http://www.myfonts.com/
 10. http://www.free-fonts.com/

So, using different criteria, we end up with quite different lists, dafont and myfonts appearing on each (although people on delicious prefer the myfonts.com “What the font” feature more than the home page).

Which is the better list? I guess we could argue that it’s subjective but on the other hand I suppose billions have been spent on finding the “best” listing. And millions of people aren’t using Google primarily because of its nice simple design, right?

At a really simple level, Google ranks sites based on the number of other sites which link up to them and weighted according to who is doing the linking.

But the point I’ve been wondering about is the difference between a link and a bookmark.

On my blog I could link up to a tonne of different webpages I find interesting for one reason or another. But I might not go back to that site, I might not need to remember that site’s URL for future reference.

A bookmark, however, implies more value than a link. I’ve already visited it once and it’s something I want to go back to in the future.

I think social bookmarking could be a central part of future algorithms of successful search engines.

Seekum is already heading along this path:

Seekum gets web pages from Yahoo web search, social bookmarking services, and pages that our users submit to us. Seekum then finds pages with related content into search results for a page based on keyword analysis, tags, and link analysis.

Seekum allows its users to sort through and find the best results for a given query. WeRank allows all of the good results to lift to the top, and the bad results to be lost into oblivion. The users have the last word on what’s relevant.

Have you been finding del.icio.us to be a useful search engine? Do you know of any other search engines exploring this area?

Summarizing Facebook Research (Social Networking)

Published by Fred Stutzman

In preparation for a conference, I've started going back over some of my recent research and opinion/theory pieces, particularly those about Facebook. I'll be appearing on a panel about social networking websites, and we'll be talking about Facebook, MySpace, Orkut and others.

Research:

   * Student Life on The Facebook - Early results of a longitudinal quantitative study I ran on Facebook utilization by UNC's Freshmen class. To be expanded into a journal article, Summer 2006.
   * The Freshmen Facebook Zeitgeist - Earlier results of the same study, with some different aspects.
   * Our Lives, Our Facebooks (pdf) - Presentation to the INSNA Social Networking Conference, Vancouver, 2006.
   * An Evaluation of Identity-Sharing Behavior in Social Network Communities (pdf) - Results of a pilot study I ran to gauge social network community use on UNC-Chapel Hill's campus. Presented at the iDMA and IMS Code Conference, 2006.
   * Political Orientation of the UNC Campus - My first Facebook research project.
   * Google Tech Talk - Video capture of a talk on the Facebook I gave at Google, Mountain View, California.
   * Public radio interview about Facebook research.
   * Podcast and slides (pdf) of a talk I gave about the Facebook.

Opinion (Social Technology):

   * Situational Relevance in Social Networking Websites - A piece I'm particularly proud of, which I think provides a roadmap for designers of social networking systems.
   * Adopting Social-Technical Communication Behavior - Post covering how Facebook, and social networking websites, are integrating new models of communication behavior that will influence future technology.
   * Leveraging the Future of Social Technology - A follow-on to the previous post, in a sense. Explores next-generation aspects of social networking.
   * Transience in Social Networks, or How to Beat MySpace and Facebook - More theory for developers of social networking services, informed by my research.
   * Facebook's Critical Success Factors - An exploration of why the Facebook captured its early market.

Opinion (Privacy):

   * Social Networks, Privacy, Security and the Media - Defining the challenges of privacy and security in social networking websites.
   * When the Gates to the Walled Garden are Thrown Open - Early coverage of Facebook privacy issues. These issues are now well-documented.
   * Our Private Lives, Protected by Terms of Use? - Extended coverage of Facebook privacy issues.

Other Posts:

   * How University Administrators Should Approach the Facebook: Ten Rules - The title explains it all.
   * Common-Sense Facebook Advice for Students - Written for students, I hope to shed a little moderating light on the potential ramifications of having a Facebook profile.
   * Faceted Search Interfaces - Exploring how people search for each other in social networking services.
   * Service Providers Doing Campus IT Better than Campus IT - Students are choosing to use the Facebook to communicate, over campus-provided tools.
   * Facebook's Value Proposition - Why it would make sense for certain companies to acquire the Facebook.
   * Facebook Expands to Corporate Markets - Why it makes sense for Facebook to accept a corporate audience.

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