Boldly Googling into the future
Published: 30 Sep 2003 16:20 BST
You reportedly have one of the biggest Linux clusters in the world (more than 10,000 servers) -- what's your opinion of the recent SCO lawsuit and what it could mean for Linux users if it's upheld? Has it made Google nervous of basing its systems around open-source?
The actual lawsuit is very narrow in its claims; we're not nervous about it at all. It's prompted lots of discussion, which has been very interesting to watch.
You have very cost-effective approach to your internal architecture. Could you expand on Google's general approach to its internal systems?
We're cheap. We use commodity computers -- thousands of them, all hooked together, to get the processing power we need -- and because it's off-the-shelf stuff, each computer is very cheap. We've had to design our software to work well in such an environment: it has to be scalable and tolerant of errors, since when you have thousands of computers at least one is always on the blink, but it's been a very worthwhile investment for us.
Your caching process has been criticised for bypassing some companies' paid-for content and other patent issues -- do you see the company having to tweak how it works, and would this affect the search time and performance of the site?
We believe the cache is a very helpful feature for sites whose content changes frequently: a user can see why we thought the page was a good match for their query, even if the Web page has totally changed since we last indexed it. For individual Webmasters who would rather we don't cache the page, for whatever reason, we make it very easy for them to opt out of the program, either by putting appropriate tags in their Web page or using an automated system we have. I think this strikes a nice balance between the various concerns.
Google is hiring and running programs like the Code Jam while other firms are still weathering the slump -- do you think the industry is going to see an up-tick any time soon?
I couldn't say about the industry as a whole, but Google continues to hire as fast as we can find good people. There's a lot for us to do, and only 300 years to do it in!
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